


Blood, Bones, Voice, Ghost

by sunsmasher



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Post-Canon, Unhappy Roadtrip, hey?, what the fuck happened to jokaste and jokaste's kid?, what the fuck happened to jokaste?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 16:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 50,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11040009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: Damen’s grip on his arm is painful. His face in Laurent’s is ashy and sheened with sweat.He says, “There was something in my drink.”(Damen is poisoned, Jokaste is framed, Laurent must find them an heir. He's put it off for so long already.)





	1. Chapter 1

The sitting room in Damen and Laurent’s suite in Marlas is warm and still in the midsummer morning. Laurent perches at the room’s sole desk, legs tangled elaborately beneath him, and reads his correspondence. As is true most mornings, there’s a lot of it.

“Please, sire,” says a very patient voice that Laurent recognizes has been saying much the same thing for several minutes now, “if we could just get you dressed, your meeting with the Lady Ambassador really is going to start soon.”

“Mmm,” says Laurent. Isthima is mulling secession again. He and his spymaster already have a few people on the island working to persuade the Kyros’ daughter of the inherent beauty in a unified federation, but they may need to speed things up a little. Someone could have very good sex with her?

“Sire,” says the voice again, despairingly. There’s something about Arlesians raised in the low quarters that makes their despair sounds truly agonized— maybe to do with their complete swallowing of all consonants. “Sire, if we could at least try pants.”

“Felix,” Laurent finally says, looking up from his papers to the steadily fretting young man standing beside his desk, trousers in hand. “How long have you been there?”

Felix, who has dark hair and dark eyes and a plain face made lovely by persistent kindness, deflates. “Sire,” he pleads, “please don’t make me go get the Exalted. He’s supposed to be getting ready, too.”

“The Exalted pins a tablecloth over his shoulder and considers it a trend well started,” Laurent says with a smile, propping his chin on his fist and his elbow on his knee. “I’m not sure our situations compare.”

“Perhaps,” says another voice, and Laurent smiles wider and leans back as two broad hands land on his collar, slide warm and slow up his throat to cradle his jaw, “if you just stopped debating poor Felix and let him get you into your laces, you too could get ready in tablecloth time.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Laurent says once Damen has finished tipping Laurent’s back chin to press a series of small, sweet kisses to his mouth. The crown of his head rests against Damen’s wide chest, which is still warm from the sun. “How seemed the Kings’ Guard? Do they miss Nikandros like Nikandros misses them?”

“They were the same as they are every week,” replies Damen. His voice is a bit thick, lending a wet note to his words as he presses another kiss just under Laurent’s eye. “Now would you please, for the good of two kingdoms, put on some clothing.”

“I’ll have you know I’m engaged in some very vital infor—” Laurent cuts off.

He gets one hand between Damen’s chin and his own cheek, shoves until Damen stumbles, and then hisses in unfeigned horror, “Damianos, did you just get _snot_ on me?”

“Uh,” Damen says, voice still _thick_ , thick with _snot_ , “I may have a cold?”

Laurent twists in his chair until his spine creaks. Damen, wearing a very ornately-trimmed tablecloth that does nothing to disguise the muscled swell of his chest, is looking sheepish and rubbing his nose. Felix, trousers still in hand, looks disappointed in all of this.

“Are you wiping your nose on your hand, are you a _child?_ ” Laurent says, hissing. Damen, who appears to have passed quickly through the valley of shame and emerged unscathed, shrugs.

“Well, I think I missed my chance here,” he says to Felix, who whines. “He’s all yours.”

“Like being married to an overlarge hound dog,” Laurent snaps, scrubbing at his cheek with the sleeve of his nightshirt.

“Sire–” Felix starts, chest ballooning like a very determined songbird’s.

“If I divorced you, the southern kyroi would _thank_ me–” Laurent continues over Felix, at which point Damen starts smiling expectantly. “There would be parades in the streets of Kesus, you–”

“ _Sire!_ Would you just stand your skinny butt up and let me _dress you! Please!”_

“Now you’ve done it,” Damen says as Laurent stops, considers, and finally rises from his seat to face a reddening Felix.

“Felix,” Laurent says, laying a hand on his valet’s faintly vibrating shoulder. Felix meets his eye gallantly, showing a mere fraction of the fear he displayed during his first year or two or three of service in Laurent’s household.

“You only had to ask,” he says, and Felix closes his eyes in plain beseechment as Damen fails to stifle his warm laughter from the corner. “Now come, it’s past time I got dressed.”

“Yes, sire,” Felix sighs as he follows Laurent to the door. Damen, apparently satisfied in the part he’s played here, leans over to peer at Laurent’s writing desk.

Damen and Laurent have, over the breadth of their unifying kingdoms, very many bedrooms. People build them bedrooms, wherever and whenever they can, simply on the off chance that Damen and Laurent should some day visit. It’s unavoidably ridiculous, but so is much of kingship.

Laurent likes their rooms at Marlas best. They’re smaller, for one thing, less ornate, the fort too recently having had a practical purpose of defense to expand much in the interim. They have all of Laurent’s favorite books (that weren’t too fragile to move from Arles, of course). Damen himself picked the few Veretian tapestries hanging from the walls, perhaps the only outstanding evidence of his growing fondness for them, and thus making these the only rooms Laurent has ever inhabited wherein he actually paid attention to the decor.

“Felix, if you put me in that I will melt,” Laurent says when Felix presents him with a tightly laced jacket in the formal style. “I will be reduced to a pale slush in front of the Vaskian Ambassador and Damianos will laugh at me.”

“Where are these mining numbers from?” Damen calls from the study as Felix rolls his eyes and returns to the wardrobe.

“Varenne,” Laurent calls back. Felix reappears with a breezier number, one of the many combinations of Veretian style and light Akielan fabrics that have come to dominate the court at Marlas in the years since its creation, and Laurent nods.

“They’re finding iron in _Varenne?”_ Damen says, coming into the room, papers in hand. He’s eyeing Laurent with slight suspicion, as has been known to happen when he reads Laurent’s letters.

 _“We’re_ finding iron in Varenne,” Laurent corrects him as Felix does up the loose, showy lacing at the back of his overshirt. Damen squints at the papers again as Laurent pulls his hair, longer and messier than he ever wore it as a prince, into a low tail.

“These are the mines you seized from Lady Genevote last year,” Damen mutters, flipping through the pages. Which they are. Genevote had been killing her miners by the dozen hunting for emeralds she never found, and Laurent had had few qualms in expropriating her operation in the name of the crown. “But there hasn’t been iron in Varenne since the old Artesian shafts were closed after—”

Damen cuts off, and now his suspicion is colored by dawning realization and the thing Laurent has come to recognize as pride, and now Laurent begins to smile.

“Months ago, in the fall, in Mellos, you introduced me to a woman who wouldn’t shut up about water wheels,” Damen says, “and she said something about seeing us soon and I had no idea what she meant at the time but...”

And then Damen laughs, suddenly and with passion, like he’s been struck with it.

“Laurent, those Artesian mines have been flooded for hundreds of years!” he says, gesturing widely with his handful of papers as he tips his shoulder against the doorframe, seeming to need the support and the motion both. “Are you telling me you’ve actually gotten them open and producing again?”

“Ianessa, as it turns out,” Laurent says with a small smile, too small to encompass the way it makes him thrill when Damen looks at him like this, like he hung the moon and stars and all the sky behind it, “was right about the water wheels.”

“You’re brilliant,” Damen says, and steps forward into the room to put his cupped hand to Laurent’s chin and to kiss Laurent’s mouth, conclusively. “Genevote’s going to be furious, of course.”

“As is her right,” Laurent replies. There’s the lightest of breezes from the window in the study, strong enough only to tug at the hem of Damon’s chiton where it brushes against Laurent’s thin pants. Felix, his mission accomplished, is very happily gone. “Martine will be watching her, though. And her fury won’t last long, I don’t think. Martine’s man in the foreman’s office suspects that only a fraction of the ore body is on our side of the border, even at the depths the Artesians dug to. Most of it’s in Vask.”

Damen, who had been preoccupied for a moment by his own hand’s path up the back of Laurent’s neck, pulls back.

“Vask,” he says.

Laurent raises an eyebrow. The suspicion has returned to Damen’s face, creasing his dark eyes, watering down his awe. Luckily, Laurent decided years ago that he liked all of Damen’s expressions in nearly equal measure.

“Laurent,” says Damen, with care, “please tell me you have not had me and our entire court negotiating the most complex trade agreement the continent has ever seen solely to secure a load of iron that Vask doesn’t even know it has.”

“Well, they’ll know they have it as soon as Ianessa lets me send her to the Empress’ court.”

_“Laurent.”_

“There are unquestionable benefits to this agreement that you already know,” Laurent replies, tilting his head back into Damen’s callused hand, which for all his growling has yet to leave Laurent's neck, “like a potential true end to the border raids, and an international acknowledgement that Vere and Akielos will be dealt with as a single entity now, further strengthening the alliance, and let’s not forget the possibility of a lasting peace with Vask, one of the most powerful states this side of the Southern Sea.”

He ticks all of these things off on his fingers as he says them. Damen eyes him, and waits for him to finish.

Laurent grins. His cheeks stretch with it.

“But I also very much want that iron.”

“You’re an unrepentant snake,” Damen groans, but pulls him close and kisses him thoroughly just the same.

 

* * *

 

The great hall at Marlas is thrown open to the summer night, dignitaries and servants and what courtiers Damen and Laurent couldn’t conspire to leave behind in Ios and Arles flitting like moths between the thousand glowing candles within the hall’s doors and the starlit gardens beyond them.

Laurent watches the eddies of food and drink and smiling persons make their paths through the grand interior of the fort-turned-palace, all three necessary to the celebration of a trade agreement well-negotiated, and feels something like satisfaction.

To feel it in a context of peace remains novel.

Damen, looking stately in his cape and chiton, stands beside Laurent. He radiates kingliness, the lion pin heavy and familiar over his shoulder, copper light shining in his hair, and Laurent is pleased to let him. Lords and ladies and daughters of kyroi, as they approach their kings, are drawn to Damen with the unerring precision of cows to a very large salt lick.

Laurent has always refused to regret that first promise, born of an impulse like a possession, to rule beside Damen. He has felt the desire to more than once, when the alliance seemed close to collapsing. How simple it would be, he had known, to let his fears make judgments upon his memories, to remember a bloody tile floor and Damen’s red hand in his and to somehow find fault in the decisions he made then.

He chooses not to. There could be no greater ingratitude.

And of all the thousand tangible benefits that have come from the alliance, Laurent thinks that having Damen stand next to Laurent at functions and look muscled and regal, to have him effortlessly accept the attention of two kingdoms with little more than a warm grin and a genuine greeting, person after person, hour after hour, while Laurent watches and listens and chimes in only when he feels the urge — this may the most welcome and most unexpected of them all.

Regardless, it's no excuse to not be paying attention. When Risha of Ver-Kindt, Ambassador of the Empress’ Court, turns to Laurent in the middle of her conversation with Damen and says, “So when may we expect your little tinkerer in the capital, short Majesty?” Laurent must very abruptly check his surprise.

Risha still notices. She’s been arguing the price of wheat with Laurent for two and a half months, and is also very smart. Negotiations might have gone a lot quicker otherwise.

“Oh, she’s got us beat,” says Damen, who still considers discretion one of Laurent’s little chores, as Laurent gives Risha a small smile.

“I’m sure we can get her to you before the passes close,” Laurent replies, to Risha’s steady-eyed grin, “but we wouldn’t want to impose. What would be most convenient for you, Lady Ambassador?”

“Oh, do not give me that snake-eyed look, short Majesty!” laughs Risha, broad and booming. She’s nearly as tall as Damen (known informally as “big Majesty”), and made taller still by her crowded piles of hair, run through with tangles of gold and silver thread. “You have played your game and you will have your iron and we will have our mines. Everyone will be happy.”

“The first time I think that’s even been said about a trade agreement,” Damen says, to another of Risha’s laughs, and he turns the conversation skillfully to the summer, and the passes, and Risha’s worst rides through the border mountains. Laurent takes his leave essentially unnoticed.

Unmoored from Damen, the center of all human interaction, Laurent can move around the hall as he sees fit. He chats with Vannes, who wonders if with Risha gone she’ll finally be able to have a diplomatic conversation that does not also contain a casual proposal for a quick fuck, and waves Laurent off with an aggrieved flush when he comments, entirely reasonably, on the several quick fucks they did have in the gardens under Laurent’s window. Jord, on duty until midnight, is much more taciturn, but divulges the guards’ gossip as readily as ever. Pallas and Lazar are off duty, and predictably nowhere to be seen. Felix is gamely avoiding the sweet-faced kyros’ daughter Laurent tried to set him up with last winter.

Martine stands just apart from the crowd, protected from the flow of bodies by two strategic couches and a footstool, and Laurent arrives beside her with a small, allowable, breath of relief.

Martine, spymaster to two kings and smarter than either of them, does not look the part. Short, plump, and with coarse silver hair rolled into a bun at the back of her head that Laurent has never seen undermined, she dresses like a provincial lady of Vere and says very little to anyone, even her two employers.

Laurent knows her name is not Martine. He knows she was born the bastard of a lord in the Veretian midlands and was sent to grow old in an eastern border fort where no one could ever learn of her father’s disgrace. Laurent also knows that when famine struck the east, less than a year into Laurent’s new reign, no man, woman, or child within thirty miles of that border fort went hungry. Martine was the reason, and she accepted a royal invitation to Marlas not two months later.

Sometime last year, Laurent had been sitting in Pascal’s surgery while she upbraided him for breaking his wrist attempting a possibly-inadvisable reverse neck layover on his favorite mare. He’d succeeded the next time he tried it, when Damen had deigned to let him on a horse again, but the memory of Martine among all the potions and poultices had survived longer than the break. A strand of hair had come free from her indomitable bun as she’d paced, her cheeks just starting to pink as she’d shouted. She’d been saying that Laurent was a fool and a idiot and a menace, but never a child, and Laurent had realized he trusted her. Almost completely. Damen had been asking him for years, only rarely aloud, to let someone help. Anyone who was not Vannes, or Nikandros, or Damen himself. And Laurent had never exactly intended to agree, but here was Martine, pausing for breath, one hand to her stomach, and asking Laurent with a very reluctant sincerity if he was alright.

Thus, Laurent doesn't mind that Martine has never told him her real name. He knows it anyways. And he doesn't mind that she’s never told him who her father was. He only has suspicions in regards to that one, but— he trusts her. It’s a remarkably simple solution to any number of problems.

“King Damianos just wiped his nose on the back of his hand,” Martine observes.

Laurent follows her gaze. Damen, across the hall from them, is reaching with his right hand to greet a Patran dignitary. He’s rubbing the left against his chiton.

“I married him for his looks,” Laurent replies, and Martine covers her mouth with one careful palm.

As they watch the crowd, Martine fills him in on the night’s news. It’s similar in tone to Jord’s gossip barracks, but with more sex and drinking. A member of Damen’s council in Ios still hasn’t realized his son’s new bride is a prostitute. Nikandros’ infant daughter pooped on a Sea Lord of Isthima last week. Someone, somewhere fucked a goat, and Martine is certain she will know who soon.

The Patran noble still hovering at Damen’s side is conspiring to remove King Torgeir from his throne.

“Is he,” Laurent says, arching an eyebrow.

One corner of Martine’s mouth tightens. It represents utter dismissal. “He’s acting prematurely,” she says. “The commoners adore Torgeir, and for all the mutterings among the old rebel governors, the unified sentiment he’s hoping for will never materialize unless the King centralizes taxation. Or strips them of their little armies. Which he doesn’t plan to do for another five years at least.”

A strong-featured woman moves past them with a goblet of wine, a member of Damen’s council hanging off her arm. By the way Martine glances to her, Laurent suspects she may be one of Martine’s own hires. Laurent was… encouraged to stop keeping track of them at the individual level some time ago.

“So our friend is here tonight to…?” Laurent prompts.

“Make a fool of himself,” Martine replies shortly. “And flirt with Lady Risha, much good may that do him. There is other news out of Patras, though, sire. News of actual interest.”

Laurent nods, still watching the room. Damen has vanished somewhere, leaving the Patran usurper looking a little put-out.

“It’s only a preliminary report,” Martine begins, an unexpected bit of hedging that makes Laurent turn to her with a frown, “I had expected verification to come in with tonight’s messenger, but there’s been a delay, and I thought it best not to wait.”

She clears her throat. “We’ve located the Lady Jokaste again, sire. In Patras. Governor Volsget’s mansion on Tenfleet Bay. We think she arrived in the spring with her son.”

Laurent says, “Ah,” and folds his hands behind his back.

Jokaste. And her son.

Martine, and Laurent himself before Martine’s arrival, have tracked her over the years. She slips away from them from time to time, as she did this winter, and she appeared to have vanished altogether in the first months after Laurent killed Kastor and Damen took his throne. Laurent’s men caught word of her in Vask, however, not long before his ascension, and Martine’s men followed the rumors. She’s crossed the continent time and again since she vanished from the road to the Kingsmeet, and her son travels with her.

Laurent does not know his name. They travel under pseudonyms.

Laurent has never acted on this information. He doesn’t, precisely, know what he’d do with it. It’s not something he and Damen have ever discussed. Damen doesn’t bring it up, he suspects, because he thinks Laurent has the whole situation well in hand and will broach the subject when Damen’s input is actually necessary.

Laurent doesn’t bring it up because he’s never been certain how to convince Damen that the bastard son of his patricide brother and the woman who sold him into slavery is the only viable heir they will ever have.

Laurent tightens his grip around his own fingers, then releases them.

“Thank you, Martine,” he says. “I’d like to read that report when it comes in. Do you have anything else for me?”

Martine tells him no, inclines her head, and departs. The crowd swallows her like a stone in choppy waters, leaving Laurent alone with his couches and his shadows.

He could talk to Damen about Jokaste. He likely should. But…

But the feeling is returning to him, gazing out at the bright-lit court he and Damen have made. Satisfaction, he could call it, or contentment. Sometimes it’s even happiness. They built this thing, together, at great expense, and they have built it well.

They survived treachery and conspiracy, famine and flood. They survived everything their families did to them and everything they did to each other. Their kingdoms flourish. Their people live good lives. Laurent lives a good life. One he never could have dreamed of at age twenty.

He straightens his back. At some point he’ll bring it all up with Damen. Eventually, it will prove unavoidable. But right now, tonight, this month, it isn’t. Laurent can set it aside and drink watered-down wine and celebrate the treaty. The world, he has been given to understand, will remain intact.

Following Martine out of their little alcove, he makes his rounds again. The party has begun to pick up as the older courtiers and councillors make for bed and the younger ones begin gesturing to the servants for the harder stuff. Griva, much to Laurent’s regret, has become something of a fad among the young and wealthy of Vere, and the flute and lyre players in the corner of the hall have picked up a fast-tempoed number that sounds suspiciously like a sea shanty.

Laurent watches the performance from the foot of the high table, not smiling but close, and feels someone beside him.

“Rid yourself of all your suitors, have you?” Laurent says. Damen’s grip on his arm is warm. He leans in close to Laurent’s chest.

Damen’s grip on his arm is painful. His face in Laurent’s is ashy and sheened with sweat.

The crowd’s noise is suddenly cacophonous, the musicians like birds screeching from the trees. Damen’s voice is almost impossible to hear.

He says, “There was something in my drink.”

 _Of course,_ Laurent hears.

 _You stupid child_.

And then he puts it away.

“Jord is on duty by the southwest doors,” he says, voice low. “Get him and get to our rooms. Can you walk?”

Damen nods. His eyes are glassy and dilated, fixed to Laurent’s.

“Good. He’ll help you once you’re out of sight of the hall. I’ll get Paschal and meet you there. Jord is looking at us now. Turn and wave him over. If anyone stops you, are you able to make excuses?”

“Oh sure,” Damen says, with a weak, unbidden smile. “I’ll tell them you’re just summoning me for a tumble.”

Laurent’s heart wrenches in a calm and fatal sort of way. He lifts Damen’s hand from his arm and points him towards Jord, who watches them now with an unclear expression.

“I’ll see you soon,” Laurent says, an unnecessary comment, and they part.

Felix is just beyond the grand doors to the garden, still hiding from his kyros’ daughter. Laurent sends him for Paschal. Martine is vanished, off completing her own work, so Laurent separates the handsome spy with the wine stain on her skirts from the councilmember and sends her running for her master. Vannes, concern in her features as she tracks his sharp movements through the crowd, is told simply to make everyone’s excuses. And then Laurent leaves.

Their rooms are too far, the stairs too steep. The guards at their door watch him with too much attention, and he masters himself as he steps into their antechamber, makes his breathing even and his grip loose.

It doesn’t help.

The room is full of people. Servants and guards cluster near the entrance. Felix is still out of breath, hovering by the door to Laurent’s study. In the bedroom, Paschal kneels down as Damen vomits heavily, and again, into a basin on his lap. Laurent notes with little care that the basin appears to be Jord’s helmet.

“What else?” Paschal is saying, one hand on Damen’s heaving shoulder. “The venison, the barley bread, the wine, what else?”

“Dates,” Damen gasps, accepting a rag to wipe across his mouth. “The cheese and honey.”

“Half the courses in the hall, it would seem,” Laurent says.

“Laurent,” Damen says, and then ducks his head down and retches like his heart and lungs are on their way up.

“Close off the kitchens,” Laurent says to Jord, eyes on the tense curve of Damen’s neck, the lank fall of his curls over his eyes. “If any servants have left for the night, bring them back. Don’t cause a scene. Lady Martine or myself will be down to question them. I also need to know what guests have left and where they’ve gone. Bring the Chamberlain to my study, not this one, down the hall, and whoever can be spared to report from the night watch. Go now.”

“Aye, Majesty,” Jord replies. There’s the noise of his departure.

“It isn’t fatal,” Paschal says, as Laurent moves forward. “He’d be dead already.”

There’s a stifled noise from Felix, away behind them, but Laurent only stops beside the physician and his husband, his feet planted in straight lines beneath his shoulders, and nods. It’s a small motion. His hands are at his sides.

Damen wipes his mouth again, letting another servant take the spoiled helmet from his hand and replace it with an actual basin. He looks up at Laurent. “Hey,” he says, voice rasping, “you okay?”

“Am _I_ —” Laurent snaps, and then stops himself, exhaling sharply through his nose.

“Yes,” he tries again. “I’m fine. You aren’t.”

“Could be better,” Damen says, with that grin again, like Laurent would be laughing if only he’d let Damen tell him the joke.

Laurent finally lifts a hand. He moves it carefully, rests it against Damen’s cheek. Damen leans against it, closing his eyes, and Laurent stays still.

“Do you know what it was?” he asks Paschal. There’s sweat at Damen’s temple, damp and hot against Laurent’s fingers.

“No,” Paschal replies, sitting back on his heels. “Hopefully they find something in the kitchens, but poison is difficult. To be honest with you, the ones that kill quickly are much easier to identify.”

“Mm,” Laurent says, and his hand is left empty as Damen leans forward to vomit yet again.

“Majesty,” says a voice, and Laurent turns.

There are more people in their rooms, crowding each other and pressing bodies against the tapestries, whispering together like air leaking from a skin. Laurent recognizes a lieutenant of the guard, and a woman beside him with grease across her apron that must be a kitchen maid.

“Sire, she says she saw someone in the pantries,” the guard goes on, as the maid glances rapidly between Damen and Laurent, her eyes wide. “She thinks she could identify him.”

“Well, that was quick,” Laurent says, his tone flat. The maid shrinks back from him, though the guard is quick to keep a grip on her arm. “Back up, all of you, we’re not doing this here.”

“No,” Damen says behind him. “Stay.”

Laurent pauses, and when he turns to look, Damen’s gaze is filmed but steady. He’s looking at Laurent.

“Fine,” Laurent says. Paschal is pressing a cup of something onto Damen, urging him to drink. “In the bedroom it is. Tell us what you saw.”

It’s a miracle the woman can form words between all the shaking and quivering. She was in the south pantry, or the east pantry, and it was just before the first course, or maybe the second? There had been so many people, sire, all running through rooms they weren’t supposed to be in, she’s sure, she’s sure.

Laurent crosses his arms over his chest, waiting for the point. He notes, behind the woman, a surge in the crowd near the door, someone else entering the room.

“But then he locked me in the buttery, sires,” the woman is saying, thin hair loose and flying around her ears. Laurent itches to cut her off, but Damen is still sitting on the bed, watching her ramble. “And I couldn’t get a good look at his face, sires, but he had a knife on him, he threatened me with it, and there was a stagshead on it, with crossed vines, like a crest, and—”

“Stop,” Damen says, command in his voice. He’s watching the woman sharply, half-rising from the sheets.

Laurent’s fingers have dug deep into the elbows of his coat.

“Are you sure it was that symbol you saw?” Damen says. One of his hands grips the bedpost like a polearm. “The ten-point stag and the vines. That symbol.”

“Your Majesty,” another voice is saying to Laurent, lower and sharper. Martine is next to him, pushing through the crowd, a scrap of paper in her outstretched hand. Her mouth is a tight, white line.

“Yes, Exalted,” the maid is saying, looking near to tears, “I’m sure! He had it right against my cheek!”

Laurent takes the note. It’s small, ripped from a larger page, and stained. “The messenger from Patras,” Martine says, each word clipped, “who was delayed. It was in her pack. She doesn’t know how.”

The note is folded in two. Laurent holds it with both hands when he opens it.

“That,” Damen says, his voice ragged and aged, as if he’d been running, as if he’d been running for years, “is the symbol of the Lady Jokaste’s house.”

 _Someone is going to try to kill him_ , says the note. _And they are going to frame me for it._

“Damianos,” Laurent says. “Wait.”

He passes Damen the note, written in Jokaste’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com/), and [this is what a reverse neck layover looks like, Laurent you crazy muppet.](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/48/a3/57/48a35793a4a5284f7c62b4e19e9fdde6.jpg)


	2. Chapter 2

The maid is still talking. Damen holds the scrap of a note like it too might poison him. He reads it again and again, in a matter of seconds, grip tightening on their bedpost until Laurent starts expecting a crack.

“Sires,” the woman tries again, and Laurent says, “That’s enough.”

He says it clearly.

“What is your name?” he asks the maid in a tone that is not asking. All other conversations have ceased. Paschal, Felix, Martine, the servants and the guards and the hangers-on, they look at him. He can hear Damen breathing heavily, noise in his chest. He looks at the maid.

“Hepione, your Majesty,” she says. Her hands have tightened the front of her apron into stiff white ridges. Her eyes, too small for her face, sagging like a melon left too long in the field, fix to Laurent’s feet.

“Hepione,” Laurent repeats. He speaks deliberately. “Hepione, do you have any children?”

Damen looks up.

“No, sire.”

“Laurent—” Damen starts, too late.

“Good,” Laurent says, tension fine and singing between his shoulders, “that will make this quicker. No one to come crying for a traitor’s body when we cut it from the gallows.”

Laurent can see from the corner of his eye, as he watches the maid Hepione go as pale as her worn rag of her dress, how Felix is looking at him. It’s a very familiar expression. It’s unfamiliar on Felix.

“Laurent,” Damen says again, and that’s familiar, too, his tone like Laurent is some snarling animal to be talked down from its fit, “you can’t think this note is real.”

“That note could have been signed by my dead father and delivered by yours and I’d still think it a more credible source than this drivel,” Laurent says, and jerks his chin at Hepione, who has begun to shake. Again. “She noticed the _crest_ on his _dagger?_ I’ve heard better lies from children.”

“Sire,” Hepione tries again, though her heart’s not in it. Her knees have hit the floor, and she bends over them without strength.

“Who paid you to tell us this?” Laurent demands, mouth curling, almost a smile. “Who coached you so poorly that you can’t even wait for us to secure the kitchens before you come running with the answer? Speak _up_ , woman, this isn’t a crypt.”

“I don’t know,” she says, breath starting to hitch into sobs, “I don’t know. He didn’t give his name. He promised— he promised money for my mother, enough to—”

“Oh, please,” Laurent says, stepping forward, and that seems to be enough for Damen.

“Everyone out.” It’s a field commander’s voice, with the expectation of obedience. “Take her to the cells— Martine, ask her your questions. We’re done here.”

Laurent lets it go, clasping his hands lightly behind him as the room rushes towards empty. The maid Hepione is taken up by her arms between two guards, fully sobbing now, as Damen gestures for Paschal to stay and Martine slips a last few words in Laurent’s ear.

Felix might have been first out the door. Their rooms, with only three bodies breathing in them, seem suddenly cavernous.

Laurent turns to face Damen, as Damen wants. Righteousness has given his husband some of his color back, put some strength in his spine, but it will be short-lived. Damen’s legs brace against a floor only he can feel heaving.

“Stop trying to prove yourself,” he tells Laurent. He blinks heavily, infrequently. “You are already King.”

Laurent lets him have his pregnant pause. His hands stay loose at his back. “That was a useful retort once, lover,” Laurent replies. “I know I am King.”

Damen breaks their stare first.

His eyes close, his face dropping like a bolt sliding home, and sinks back onto the bed. He lands with his head just above his knees, and Laurent feels the neat stitches of purpose in his skin go suddenly slack.

Carefully, he perches on the sheets beside Damen. An inch or two of fabric is preserved between them. The scars across Damen’s back stretch each time he inhales.

“One day we’ll stop doing this in front of you,” Laurent says to Paschal.

“Yes, your Majesty,” Paschal replies.

“Tell me about the poison.”

Paschal repeats himself: Damen is not dead. He won’t be, if it’s already been this long since he was dosed and he still has the strength to yell at Laurent about decency. He doesn’t know what the poison is. He doesn’t know what long-term effects it could have. He doesn’t know what will happen if Damen gets dosed again.

“I could just die slowly,” Damen says, pressing his hands into his hair. “Piece by piece.”

Paschal’s face remains impassive, as it has throughout Laurent’s life, since he was a child, but he meets his King’s eye steadily when Laurent asks, “Is there anything else to be done at the moment?”

“You’re probably going to keep vomiting, Exalted,” Paschal says to Damen, “It was a strong emetic I gave you. Drink water when you’re done, and I can take a look at you again in the morning.”

“Thanks, Paschal,” Damen says, muffled.

Laurent does the same, and Paschal closes the door behind himself when he leaves.

And then they are alone. Air pushes lazily through the room, heavy with salt from the coast.

“Maybe someday I’ll get him to call me Damen.”

“You won’t,” Laurent says.

“I’d settle for Damianos.”

“I fear it’s beyond hope.”

“How can you be so sure this isn’t her?”

Laurent pauses. Damen is kneading his thumb into the meat of his palm, hard, as if unworking a strain. Laurent watches him do it, then reaches an arm behind him for the scrap of paper still lying forgotten on their sheets.

“She stamped her signet ring into the paper,” Laurent says, passing him the note. “I assume she didn’t have wax. But you can see the impression if you tilt it towards the light.”

Damen does. The stag and the vines, hemmed in by the sharp loops of her J. He laughs raggedly, without feeling.

“Of course,” he says. “That makes it simpler.”

He passes it back to Laurent, who, unable to think of what else to do with it, holds it in his lap. “What are your other reasons?” Damen says.

“Do I need any more?”

“It’s never been a question of need with you. And anyone can steal a ring.”

“True,” Laurent admits, brushing his hair behind his ear. It came loose from its braid at some point, maybe before they’d even left the great hall. He wonders what Vannes told everyone. “But sending Martine’s new friend Hepione to immediately reveal her own plot would be slightly counterintuitive. And whoever did this to you, they wanted to put on a show. To make you violently ill in front of hundreds of our guests, maybe even force an immediate manhunt for the perpetrator. It’s not a bad way to frame someone.”

Damen finally looks at him, a brief, hazy glare from under his curls. “Stop sounding so appreciative.”

“Make me,” Laurent replies, allowing himself a small smile. He presses the note open over the curve of his thigh, running his fingertips across the ink. _And they are going to frame me for it_.

He says, “I think she’s in trouble.”

Damen watches him and waits. His throat works as he swallows, keeping something down.

“She wrote this in a hurry, unencoded, on a scrap of paper,” Laurent says. “She didn’t have wax for a seal, or even charcoal to make a rubbing of her ring. And she used our own messengers to get it to us. Martine tells me our regular rider from Torgeir’s court in Bazal found this mixed in with her other Patran intelligence, with no clue as to how it got there.”

“Do you know how it got there?”

“In a way,” Laurent says, and, as a favor to Damen, doesn’t let that note of respect back into his voice. “The rider’s horse threw a shoe on the way out of Bazal and she was forced to stop at a farrier along the coast road, in Governor Volsget’s mansion. Which, I have also learned tonight, is where Jokaste has been staying since at least the spring. How she knew who our rider was, and how she get the note in her pack, I could not tell you. Whatever her method, though, this was quick and dirty. An act of desperation.”

“And you want to help her,” Damen says. He sounds… resigned. Beneath even the exhaustion and the sickness. Like he’ll agree to this, eventually, but he needs Laurent to give him the reason first. The justification.

So Laurent does.

“Yes,” he says, into their dim and empty rooms. “Her son is our heir.”

And that’s the crux of it.

“She said the child wasn’t mine,” Damen says. Now his tone is almost rote, as if he’s had this conversation before. Like Laurent, some background part of his mind always rehearsing his lines without ever subjecting them to real inspection.

“Yes, she did say that.”

“You think she was lying?” Damen asks. He sits mostly upright, leaning his side against the bedpost. It takes his body further from Laurent.

“I think she tried to do you one merciful thing at the very end,” Laurent says. “Whatever the truth was.”

Damen cuts his gaze away, exhaling with that weight again, too long spent running down the same road. “Seems you know her better than I ever did,” he says, to which Laurent doesn’t reply.

“We could adopt,” Damen says, after a stretched-out moment.

“Whether from you or Kastor, the child is of your father’s line,” Laurent says. “Neither of us have any closer blood relations. We can’t let him run loose forever.”

“We could take mistresses,” Damen counters, in a reasonable tone. “Make some new blood relations.”

Laurent snorts. “Maybe you could.”

“No,” Damen says, and reaches out over those last few inches of unbroken space and takes Laurent’s hand in his own. “Probably not.”

He fits their fingers together. Laurent’s cheeks warm like he’s been lying somewhere silly, with birds and sun and flowers. He clears his throat a bit pointlessly.

“So,” Damen sighs, “a rescue. For both of them.”

“I think it’s the safest way to proceed,” Laurent replies, getting a hold of himself. “We take who we trust, we ride for Tenfleet Bay, and we try and save Jokaste and the child before whoever it is that’s behind this realizes their captives will no longer be of use.”

Damen eyes him. His thumb makes lazy circles on the back of Laurent’s hand. “You think it won’t look a little odd, the two kings of the alliance riding full speed into Patras with no warning and for little reason?”

Laurent shrugs. “We have a reputation for odder.”

“Daring, to assign me any sort of blame for that.”

“I don’t think it can be helped, regardless,” Laurent says, smiling despite himself. “I’m sure the rumor that Jokaste has conspired to kill you is already halfway to Arles by now, but if we have the smallest chance of controlling how the world learns about our new heir, I want to take it. We’re only going to get one chance at this. If there are mistakes, let them be our own.”

“And if we don’t make it in time?” Damen asks. His dark-eyed gaze is still hazy, tired and sick. “A single rider changing horses will always be faster than us, unless we leave right now, tonight, without soldiers or supplies. What happens if this mysterious captor decides their plan has failed before we can even reach the border?”

“To some extent,” Laurent says, “we will just have to trust that Jokaste can hold her own.”

There’s a pause, and it lengthens, and then Damen lets go of Laurent to scrub both hands through his hair with a rush of movement that’s almost startling.

“We really did leave her out there too long, didn’t we,” he sighs, seeming not to notice the way the remark makes Laurent tense with guilt. “Alright, to Patras we go. It’s been a while since we caused an international incident anyways, we—” he stops suddenly, gestures, “—the basin, give me the basin, quick.”

Laurent lurches forward, snatching the pottery from beside his feet and landing it in Damen’s lap just in time to catch his dinner. Or lunch.

“You could stay,” Laurent says, with a rush he didn’t plan for as Damen leans over, heaves, retches, spits, “You could work with Nikandros and Martine, to try and unravel this from here while I fetch Jokaste and the child. It might be— safer.”

“No,” Damen says, harsh like a cough. He drags his hand hard across his mouth. “No. I have no intention of dying in my bed.”  


* * *

 

It takes them a week to leave. Every minute of it screams between Laurent’s teeth like biting through chalk.

Damen, the morning after they make their decisions, is woozy and fatigued from the emetic, wheezing still with the previous day's cough. He likens the experience to the hangover he had after he reached his majority, the one that lasted a week and took Nikandros and half of the southern nobility with it. Laurent sits beside him in their bed, writing out letters on a lap desk, and listens to his looping talk with one ear.

The first of his letters is encoded, to be taken by one of Martine’s riders to King Torgeir and his brother, and contains a hasty explanation, a few necessary pieces of context, and some preemptive apologies. Laurent’s next letter, summoning Nikandros up to Marlas and flown by pigeon to Ios, also contains some apologies. Neither Damen nor Laurent are of any belief that this will help.

Together, they review the list of men and women who will accompany them, compiled for their eyes by Martine and Jord. It’s a short list, a dozen soldiers, the necessary camp followers, but still it unnerves Laurent how many of the names he does not immediately recognize. Kingship involves more hands-off decision making than he ever dealt with as a Prince, and upon Damen’s insistence he had come to accept it, but it grates more now than any time since he took his throne. It feels like a lack of control, and an inability to breathe.

The day before they’re set to ride, Nikandros arrives in Marlas and Damen is poisoned. Again.

Laurent goes alone to meet Nikandros at the docks, standing straight-backed at the end of the pier as the sun heats his cheeks and the wind off the sea chills and bites through his summer clothes. Nikandros, who resents ships as only a man introduced to them late in life can, disembarks with a faint grey tinge beneath his southern tan.

“Hail, Kyros,” Laurent greets him, to which Nikandros bites out a, “Your Majesty.”

Nikandros’ hairline has begun to recede this year. Damen thinks it’s funny, and only ever smiles wider whenever Laurent points out the gray hairs coming in at Damen’s temples. It was a conversation they’d had not hours ago. This morning. Damen had laughed, and the sun had picked out every silver flash in his curls.

“How was your journey?” Laurent asks, with the setting sun in his eyes.

“I don’t care for the ocean,” Nikandros replies. His follow-up, as his eyes scroll from Laurent’s pale freckled face to the spotless tips of his shoes, is unspoken.

It’s not that Nikandros still hates Laurent. He doesn’t. Hardly at all. Laurent is an uncle to his children. Laurent introduced him to his wife, a granddaughter of the last Veretian lord of Delfeur. The political advantage of their match had been exceeded only by Nikandros’ sincere adoration for the Lady Nathalie— her laugh, her wit, her masterful knowledge of siege warfare— and when Nikandros had shaken Laurent’s hand the day of the wedding, it was a long time before he let go.

But there is no wedding today. And Laurent stands as if upon the edge of a marsh, waiting for the ground to sink.

“So, care to tell me why you’ve dragged me up here on four days notice?” Nikandros asks, loudly, as they step onto shore and are subsumed by the hollering noise of the trading hub grown between the western walls of Marlas and the shore in recent years. A few of the passing merchants and dogsbodies start when they recognize Laurent, lacking his circlet and with his hair pulled back tight, but he is too familiar a sight to worry most of them. “Your note was… sparse.”

“We need you to keep an eye on the court for a few weeks,” Laurent replies. “Damianos and I will be away, a situation of some complexity has arisen in Patras.”

Nikandros stops, planted against the crowd’s flow, and looks dumbstruck.

“A situation— Laurent,” he says, “I didn’t sail four days through a blasted summer storm on some merchant’s rotten dinghy for you to _lie to me.”_

He— had he meant to do that?

Laurent stops in turn, his features smooth. Beneath the noise of trade and transaction there are the sounds, like sirens to Laurent, temptation and warning both, of people with a more urgent purpose. People hunting, and calling out in soldiers’ voices.

Nikandros’ eyes are on Laurent, affronted and a little confused.

He knows Nikandros. Damen trusts him with his life.

He can’t lie to him. That would be senseless.

“You’re right,” Laurent says, the words easy, unforced, “of course. We’ll go up to the fort,” he adds, turning away. “You’ll be wondering why he didn’t come down to meet you.”

 

* * *

 

Together, they stand at the edge of the room in the Kings’ apartments. Laurent’s hands are flattened hard between his back and the chilled stone walls. Nikandros is beside him. Wine and a platter of food are splashed across the tile, drying now, starting to stain. Paschal will inspect them when he can. Right now he’s busy.

They watch side by side, King and Kyros, as the physician pours things down Damen’s throat and helps him cough them back up, as reports come in from Jord’s men ransacking the kitchens, reports from the soldiers scouring the grounds and the village and the far sprawl of docks.

“How did this happen?” Nikandros asks. His voice is low, pulled from someplace painful.

“I don’t know,” Laurent says, and thinks he might rather have his tongue pulled out than admit this.

He’d halved the kitchen staff. Thrown out any of the stores that even looked funny, trapped mice and fed them crumbs to test the rest of it. Hepione, per Martine’s slim reports, could provide no better intelligence than “a strange figure in an alley offered me sufficient money to betray my kingdom.” The head cook developed a habitual twitch and Damen ate only what Laurent was sure, was _absolutely sure,_ was safe.

It wasn’t enough. There was something he missed. There’s nothing left in Damen’s stomach and still his husband heaves, that same urgent violence of muscles, and Laurent leans back on his hands until he can feel the imperfect stone dig hard into his palms.

Nikandros looks at Laurent. His face is set, but not unkindly.

“Don’t just stand here staring,” he says. “I’ll be outside when you’re done. You can explain then.”

He turns for the door. Laurent pushes away from the wall, towards Damen.

In time, once Laurent has had his quiet conversation with Damen, and given Nikandros his time to do the same, they stand in Laurent’s office.

It’s far grander than his study in their apartments, intended to intimidate, with paintings of long-gone ancestors packing the walls and a desk like the trunk of a tree cut harshly square, too heavy even for Damen to do more than budge.

Nikandros sits on an ornately carved bench he doesn’t seem to approve of as Laurent takes the chair across from him. Laurent explains in short, clear sentences what is actually happening. It takes him a long time. Nikandros has many questions, most of which amount to his original one: _How? Why? What did we miss?_

Laurent answers them all. Nikandros likes none of it, and knows, visibly, that it does not matter if he doesn’t like it. His role has already been decided.

The Marlas court will not stop in their absence, is the thing. Its intrigue won’t cease. Most likely, the intrigue will grow several more heads and start hunting lesser creatures for sport, and so here is Nikandros. To stand authoritatively in the midst of their court and not give anyone an inch they have not repeatedly earned. Laurent and Damen’s ultimate goal of bringing their heir and his mother back to court can’t stay secret forever, not with the messy haste with which they’re departing, but perhaps Nikandros can at least keep the rabble from taking advantage of the inevitable chaos of their absence.

“You want me to babysit the Veretians,” Nikandros says, as the stars begin to peek between the curtains and the candles gutter and flame, “and see if any of them start sounding like regicides.”

“Our court consists of more than Veretians,” Laurent replies, “and so too does the list of people who could profit from Damen’s death.” Nikandros knows this. Laurent has already told him this, tonight. “Considerably more.” As the sky had bled purple before black.

Laurent leans back as he begins his list, one elbow over the back of his chair. Nikandros has heard this, too. “Akielon secessionists,” Laurent begins, “Vaskians upset with the recent treaty.” He taps a finger against his thigh with each suggestion. It’s a steady beat. “Patrans intimidated by the political force our treaty with Vask represents. Patrans attempting to overthrow Torgeir by means of an unexpectedly far-reaching conspiracy. Any number of slavers whose business was lost to our reforms.” His eyes ache with tiredness, every peripheral glimpse he catches of the last bright-burning candle sending another sliver of pain through his skull.

“Some murderous, forgotten member of Kastor or my uncle’s faction,” he continues, “an honest lunatic. Or, yes, some number between one and all of my countrymen. Who could be offended by the alliance, by my sidelining of the council, by Damen’s mere presence in their politics, or simply by the temperature of their breakfast that morning.”

Laurent’s voice picks up at the end of his little speech, something he didn’t intend. It lends a quality like a snarl to his words. He swallows it and adds, “Nor have we even gotten started on Jokaste’s enemies.”

The uneven light draws deep furrows in Nikandros’ ever-expanding forehead. His head landed on his fist some hours ago, propped on the arm of his bench, and has not moved since.

“And we have no means by which to narrow this list down,” he says.

“No,” Laurent says. He intends to leave it at that. They’ve been over this already, more than once, the lack of clues, Laurent’s inability to find them. They have no need to rehash. But then he realizes that his hands have tightened into fists and he’s saying, with an uncontrolled note, a tongue that feels too thick in his mouth for human speech: “I don’t even know what they’re giving him.”

“Alright,” Nikandros says, sitting up, his face moving quickly. “Alright. We’ll figure it out.”

 

* * *

 

They ride out a day late, with as little fanfare as they can manage.

There is no grand ceremony, no councillors or courtiers to draw out the very military process of checking straps and tightening girths. The hour is early, and Nikandros will answer any questions that should arise when the court wakes. Or not answer them, sternly, as the situation calls for.

The men and women in the courtyard preparing to ride are, as much as they can be, trusted. Jord and Pallas and Lazar will ride with them, as will seven more who have either followed Laurent from the Prince’s Guard or fought with Damen in their aborted campaign to take their thrones. Governor Volsget, Laurent has confirmed over the past week, is a hardened veteran, commander of hundred battles against the pirates (and sometimes Akielons) that used to raid Patras’ coast, and it will not do to be unprepared if it's his forces that are keeping Jokaste captive. The other two armored riders rounding out their dozen are employees of Martine’s. One Laurent recognizes as the woman from the night of the banquet, handsome still without her paint, and the other is a man unknown to Laurent.

“Ready?” Damen asks, coming up beside him.

A week of illness has made Damen leaner, weight shaved off his cheeks and sides. He’s awake, though, and aware, and able to ride. That’s all they need.

“I don’t know who that is,” Laurent says, looking past Damen to Martine’s man swinging up into the saddle.

“The Thracian? He’s one of the spies.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“Martine picked him herself. We signed off on her recommendation.”

“I know that, too.”

Damen is looking at him, with dark eyes and a pallor to his skin that Laurent hasn’t seen on him since Arles, since he was a slave dragged from the post and left to heal on his stomach with a back like raw meat.

The horses stamp impatiently in the courtyard. They’ve been avoiding discussing something.

“If we run from here,” Laurent says, “and discover along the road that you are still being poisoned, then it will be someone we trust that has done it. Someone we trust, or someone that such a person has staked their life and reputation on. We are bringing no one else with us.”

Damen doesn’t deny it. With his grim eyes and a full mouth pulled tight at the corners, he follows Laurent’s gaze out over their party.

The soldiers, heeding Jord’s barked orders as they saddle up and kick their horses into formation. The spies falling in with them, their own orders received some time ago in the predawn chill of Martine’s tower office. Paschal, overseeing the last of his potions being packed into the wagons. Cook and quartermaster, grooms, wagon driver, servants. Felix on a skittish young gelding, rubbing a quick hand up and down its neck as he tries to calm it amongst the people and noise.

Felix has avoided Laurent’s eye since last week. When Laurent had gone after the maid Hepione and Damen shouted him down.

“You’re right,” Damen says, and pulls Laurent conclusively from the unstable boil of his thoughts by taking hold of his hand. Laurent looks down at their intertwined fingers on short, surprised instinct. “Hopefully I don’t get poisoned again.”

Damen’s hand in his is still too warm. His grip is tight. “I usually try to avoid operating on ‘hopefully,’” Laurent replies.

“I’m aware. We’ll figure it out.”

“So people keep telling me.”

“Because, and this may be shocking, it’s true.”

Damen is smiling when he says it, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He is trying to comfort Laurent, to ease his worries, to shore him up.

Laurent realizes as he searches Damen’s face, with a sharp twisting sensation in the depths of his gut, that Damen does not believe the shit he’s selling.

“Come on,” Damen says, as their horses are brought forward and the last of their party take their positions. “We’ve got a long ride ahead. Jokaste won’t forgive us for keeping her waiting.”

“Of course. She might launch another coup with all this time she’s got on her hands,” Laurent replies, tone as light as Damen’s, and mounts his horse smoothly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emma literally wrote a paragraph of this for me. I also just took one of her lines from her Ace Attorney WIP. It's the "thumb making big lazy circles" one. Took that right from her. To be clear, Emma has helped me plot, outline, and edit so much of this fic the only reason she isn't getting coauthor credit is because she'd have to give me the same on the AA fic. Thanks, buddy!


	3. Chapter 3

If nothing else, Delfeur is beautiful in the summer.

They ride south along the coast, making good time among the low golden hills, aiming for the great trade route that spans the continent from the western coasts to the far eastern seas. Each humped and twisting carob tree they pass hums unevenly with cicadas, and each time Laurent thinks of Acquitart, and summers with the bugs and the ponies, and Auguste.

Beside Laurent, on his charger built like a wine barrel on stilts, Damen grimaces. The cold he picked up in Marlas dogs him still, and he squints faintly as he coughs, as if staring into the morning sun.

It’s evening, and they ride into the blooming stars with the sunset still warming their backs.

As they ride that night, and the day after it, Laurent watches Damen’s carved profile, eyes catching on the small motions of discomfort that look so unfamiliar on the King of Akielos. Damen keeps his hand tight around the reins, his back rigid, his seat deep out of training more than ease. The thick muscles of his jaw pulse each time the horses mount an incline or fumble their footing on a descent. Laurent is not sure if Damen suppresses these flinches because he seeks to hide them or because he’s as unfamiliar with his own weakness as Laurent.

Sometime on the third day, he manages to pull his eyes away.

That night, long past the time most of their men have gone to sleep, Laurent finds his husband and Jord sprawled beside the fire, laughing with hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes.

“And then—” Jord gasps, laughing into his palm as Damen shushes him, “—and then she’s storming off and the handsome little idiot turns to me and says he’d only been trying to catch up on his reports!”

“No,” Damen says with hushed horror, dark eyes widening, “don’t tell me—”

“He was doing them on her back!” Jord nearly cries. Damen’s shushing motions grow more frantic. “Fucking her like a dog and tidying up his paperwork while he was it! And he had the gall to be surprised when she slapped him!”

“Oh, he got off _easy,”_ Damen laughs as Jord says, almost a whimper as he leans back and wipes his eyes, sSave us all from idiots and young men, eh?”

“But then who would be left?” Laurent asks when he steps between them, putting a hand to Damen’s shoulder. Damen, still wheezing gamely, takes it, kisses it soundly, then resettles it on his shoulder with a pat.

“Oh, I think Vask would manage, sire. And probably you,” Jord says, smiling as he gathers up his empty mug.

“You’re not going, are you?” Damen says, accentuating his protest with a pout that little fits his stately features. “It’s hardly midnight!”

“It’s well past that,” Jord says as he stands, “and I suspect his Majesty has your dinner for you. I won’t keep you up.”

“Good night, Jord,” Laurent says, his hand on Damen’s shoulder prompting Damen to stand with only minor grumbling. “Thank you for keeping him company.”

“Always a pleasure, sire,” Jord replies, and then, seeming to catch himself, “—sires.”

Damen sighs as Jord departs, letting Laurent lead him back to their tent. “You know, he calls me Damen just fine.”

“The two of you are soldiers,” Laurent replies, “and speak a language impenetrable to all other classes of man. Forgive Paschal his formalities. They’re all he has.”

“If you insist,” Damen says with a long clear of his throat, thumping down on their small camp bed. Again Laurent notices the sharp jut of his cheekbones, the grey skin beneath his long-lashed eyes. Despite Damen’s lingering cheer, the marks of his fatigue are obvious, as clear to Laurent as blood welling through cotton.

“Here,” he says, tossing Damen a napkin-wrapped bundle. Damen catches and unwraps it neatly, picking at bread and olives and bites of cold lamb as Laurent begins to undress. It requires a certain amount of flexibility, with Felix already asleep and Laurent wearing one of his more intricate jackets, but the task is not impossible. This had been a real shock to Damen the first time he saw it done.

“This roll is much less full of weevils than last night," Damen says, watching Laurent fit his hands between his shoulderblades and weave his fingers between the jacket’s lacing with his traditional incredulity. “Didn’t have to trade with an acting troupe this time?”

“There’s an inn a few miles south, lucky for you,” Laurent replies. “You know, you could help me if you find the process so fascinating.”

“I wouldn’t want to get in your way,” Damen says, around an olive or two. “And this may be a stupid question, but you didn’t bring our groom with you, did you? Jord couldn’t find him when we made camp, we had to have Felix rub down my horse.”

“I did, yes.” Laurent shifts his elbow up higher, and, at last, feels the topmost lace come free. “I gave him coin to buy rations then sent him back to Marlas.”

He notes the silence from Damen’s general area as he finally shucks the jacket.

“You sent him back to Marlas?” Damen says. He’s making an effort to keep his tone from going flat. Laurent notes that, too.

“I don’t truly suspect him of poisoning you, before you ask,” Laurent says, turning. “He was just first on my list. His duties were relatively simple to take over, as Felix has so ably demonstrated.”

“I—” Damen starts, seemingly troubled by where to begin. “Felix is terrified of your mare, and— Laurent, what list, why on earth do you think I’m still being poisoned?”

Laurent, the hem of his nightshirt still caught between his hands, can’t help but stare. A hunk of lamb is forgotten between Damen’s fingers, dripping forlornly onto his thigh. He’s staring back at Laurent.

“Damen,” Laurent begins, speaking carefully, “Paschal said as much _this morning._ ”

“He said I was recovering slowly,” Damen says, returning it like a parry.

“He said it was possible you were recovering slowly, or it was possible that you were being given smaller doses _of poison.”_

“A possibility!” Damen snaps. “Not enough to dump on the side of the road a man who has looked after my family since my father was on campaign—”

Laurent keeps from shouting with great effort.

“You are in pain,” he says, cutting through Damen’s protests. “You are fatigued and without appetite, and— no, _listen to me_ , Damen, you’ve barely eaten what I’ve brought despite the ten hours since your last meal, and you barely ate then, either. You are suffering. I know what it looks like.”

“I haven’t eaten a thing you haven’t personally handed me since we set out!”

“Yes,” Laurent bites out. “I’m also curious as to the current method of administration.”

Damen’s heavy-featured face is stubborn and set. “Or it’s not being administered at all,” he begins again, “I could very well be—” and that’s enough for Laurent.

“No,” he says, with no possibility of uncertainty. “You attempted to ride out for the hunt three weeks after Kastor cut your stomach open.” His hands move finally, a sharp gesture. “You do not heal slowly,” he says. “You are not healing from this.”

Damen is reluctant, Laurent can see. The fact of his poisoning turns some fundamental part of him, offends some instinct Laurent can’t immediately recognize, but the lamplight in their tent is low and flickering. The small camp outside is quiet. Damen sighs, and rubs the heel of his palm into his eye.

It’s like winning a swordfight against a man you’ve just coshed. A win all the same, but not exactly to Laurent’s tastes.

“I still think it’s too early to say that I’m still being poisoned,” Damen says at length, though he’s no longer attempting to eat. He tosses the bundle of food onto the folding table beside Laurent’s chest of clothes. “And Felix is absolutely going to get bitten before the week is out. But mostly I wish you’d conferred with me first before sending Priskos back. I would have liked to speak with him.”

“I did what I thought was best,” Laurent says, though he feels again that skin stretched tight and prickling across his sternum, like when Nikandros had spoken to him on the docks. _I didn’t sail four days for you to lie to me._

“I know you did,” Damen replies. His hand still rubs at his eye, a slow, heavy movement. “I’m not— Just tell me next time, before you leave someone else behind. Please.”

Laurent doesn’t reply. Damen nods anyways.

“Alright,” he says. “Bed, then. And another long ride tomorrow.”

They undress in relative silence, the routine of a night on the road too familiar to require much talk. Their tent is small, quicker to break down and lighter to carry when such things are important, and each brush of their arms or sides is unavoidable. Laurent doesn’t seek them out, though, as he might have.

The summer night is warm, the breeze from the coast balmy. Too hot for Damen to roll over and hold Laurent to his chest as he does in the fall or winter, or farther north in Arles.

Instead Laurent feels Damen settle beside him under the thin sheet, one arm resting between them. “Good night,” he says, voice already drowsy, “I love you.”

Laurent closes his eyes.

It’s a policy of sorts. One Damen has never asked Laurent to abide by, but to which he holds himself rigidly. If they’ve fought, if they’ve disagreed, then he tells Laurent he loves him before he sleeps.

 _Obviously you can piss me off like no one else,_ Damen had explained when Laurent first questioned it, years ago, before he’d even taken his throne. He hadn’t understood Damen’s intention then, unable to stop looking for the trap even as Damen had smiled. _But I love you more than I’m angry at you. That’s always going to be true. And I like to remember that._

It had been confusing then, almost to the point of resentment. Laurent can barely claim to understand it now. He thinks he sees the value, though. Like a language he doesn’t yet speak, but in which he has learned poetry.

“I love you, too,” he replies quietly, tangling his hand with Damen’s. “Good night.”

 

* * *

 

In the morning, once Felix has laced him in and Damen has, with a few false starts and a prolonged coughing bout, gotten out of bed, Laurent goes and says good morning to Tiffy.

Tiffy, being a mare and a minor menace, is picketed a short distance from the rest of the troop’s horses. She comes to immediate attention when she sees Laurent approach, and butts her nose into his stomach as soon as he’s within reach.

“Hello, lovely,” Laurent says to her, softly, running his hand from the warm velvet of her nose up to her forelock as Tiffy whuffles happily at the apple slices in his palm. She was Damen’s first gift to him, one of the summer palace’s many surprises, and rides smoother than any horse in the allied kingdoms. She snorts when Laurent ceases petting her, ears flicking back impatiently, and presses her dark nose to his jacket until he smiles and resumes his ministrations.

“Now, Felix will be helping tend to you for the foreseeable future,” he says as he unties her lead from the picket line, “and while I respect and admire your usual discriminating taste when it comes to grooms, we will likely be increasingly short-handed until we return to Marlas. Felix is a very pleasant young man, and doesn’t deserve to have his toes broken. Can you find it in your beautiful heart to refrain from breaking his toes?”

Tiffy seems to consider the request as they walk towards camp, tail swishing contemplatively.

“At the very least, we can’t let Damen be right about you,” Laurent adds.

This at least Tiffy finds indisputable. She eyes Felix when he approaches with a hoof pick and a slightly daunted expression, but finally assents, with great dignity, to let him pet her nose. Laurent keeps one hand on her halter and thanks her kindly.

“She was a gift from Damianos, shortly after we formed the Alliance,” Laurent says from Tiffy’s head as Felix works the pick into her rear hoof, “Her full name is Veillantif.”

“Like the Hero’s horse?” Felix asks, bent over his work. He puffs fruitlessly at a bit of hair fallen into his eyes, unwilling to pause in his scraping to brush it away.

“Just the one,” Laurent replies. “You know the stories?”

“I heard them told, sure,” Felix says, letting Tiffy’s hoof down and moving carefully around her to the other. “My sisters and I grew up with tales of the first King’s great knight, who wielded the sharpest of all swords and rode the swiftest of all horses.”

“Swiftest and the loveliest, of course,” Laurent says to Tiffy, who whickers. Felix laughs quietly, his back still to Laurent.

Felix came into Laurent’s service some three years ago, during a visit to Arles that was planned to last a month and dragged on for an agonizing five after several long-simmering irritations in the court came concurrently to a head. Damen had arrived at the end of those five months, determined to extricate Laurent from the situation by whatever means necessary, and had a pitcher of wine dumped in his lap his very first night in Arles.

It was not some arcane act of sabotage, as Laurent had first thought. Felix, three weeks into his pet contract with a noble of the court and desperately anxious about most everything in his life, merely had sweaty palms. He broke down crying on the spot.

Damen, dripping wine from the waist down, had looked at Laurent. Laurent had looked back. Laurent had sighed. And then Laurent had bought out Felix’s contract, made him a servant in the royal household, and spent the next year trying to convince him not to hide behind a drape whenever Damen came into the room. Having Damen sit down and explain the number of priceless antiques he’d broken because he’d been distracted by Laurent’s bare legs (two) had ultimately been key.

Felix was a miserable pet. As Laurent’s valet he excels, and Laurent has come to appreciate deeply his attention, his patience, and his many kindnesses.

Thus it’s disconcerting that they have completed almost the entire process of grooming and saddling Tiffy without Felix ever once meeting his eye.

They walk Tiffy back to the picket line. Damen’s charger, as even-tempered a gelding as was ever sired, won’t require Laurent’s supervision to saddle. Felix reaches for his lead.

“You’re still uncomfortable around me,” Laurent says.

“I, no, your Majesty,” Felix starts immediately, then: “I—” and he stops, thin-lipped, unable to find an excuse.

“It’s alright,” Laurent says, as Felix begins to show a splotchy red flush. Laurent doesn’t have Damen’s knack for sincerity. The things he means truly always seem to land as sarcasm in others’ ears, but he tries anyway. One must keep at it, supposedly.

“There was a reason I wanted to remove everyone from our bedchambers before I spoke with the maid,” he says, with Damen’s gelding nosing plaintively at his hands. “I knew I would likely get… short with her, let’s say.”

Felix holds. His throat bobs, his eyes on the grass, his shoulders high around his ears.

Finally, carefully, he smiles.

“It’s okay, sire,” he says, meeting Laurent’s eye. His ruddy cheeks dimple kindly. “It was a little unexpected, yes, but I know it was still you underneath— all of that. There was a lot going on. I know you were only doing what you had to.”

There is the impulse, immediate, like the need to bite, to say _I asked Damen if he spread his legs for his brother when I knew he could not return the blow and I did it because I was bored and I wanted to hurt him._

But there would be no point. Sincerity only has so many uses.

“I’m glad you think so,” Laurent says instead, and his smile is true enough. “Do you think you can handle Xanthos alright?”

“Oh, sure,” Felix says, as Xanthos begins to lip at his ear, growing either creative or desperate in his search for treats. “He’s a big sweetie. I think even an Arlesian like me can get him ready to go.”

“Of course,” Laurent says, and then, eyeing the grey-stained mess of leather masquerading as a girth that Felix has draped over his shoulder, says, “and of course you also know that one must clean the tack before one puts it on the horse.”

“Oh,” Felix says, and then, with his flush returned and his smile valiantly preserved, “I may have heard about that, yes.”

 

* * *

 

They ride hard. In the night, Jord wakes them.

“Your Majesty,” he says, low and urgent, and Laurent wakes with a sick start, already reaching for the scabbard lying just under the bed.

“Your Majesty, one of Lady Martine’s riders is here,” Jord says, voice still low, stepping out of reach. “She has something for you. She won’t tell me what.”

No immediate attack. Laurent closes his eyes, inhales. Runs a hand from forehead to chin, hard, feeling the skin stretch and drag. Exhales. He looks at Jord.

Damen, beside him, is just pushing himself up on his elbows, groggy and slow to consciousness. Slower than normal. Slower than he should be.

 _Not now._ Look at Jord.

Jord is on midnight watch, and the grimy orange light of the lantern in his hand throws dark shadow across his face, leaving just his chin, his cheek, the shape of one tired eye picked out in its oily burn. More torches are lit outside. By their light Laurent can see shapes moving beyond their tent, people and horses, silhouetted like paper monsters in a child’s play.

“Bring her to me,” Laurent says, “And the spies, as well, the Thracian and the— “

He can’t remember her name. The one from the banquet.

“The tall one?” Jord says. “The Barbinoise?”

“Yes, them,” Laurent replies. “Go. Damen, get up.”

His hand is on Damen’s shoulder, gently shaking. Damen pushes himself up fully, voice rough and stalling when he says, “What’s going on?”

“A midnight message from one of Martine’s couriers,” Laurent tells him, brushing the hair back from Damen’s face with a careful hand. His thumb strokes the little nick of a scar through his left eyebrow.

Damen’s forehead is warm to the touch, his dark skin sheened with sweat. Laurent wishes he could believe it’s the heat.

“I suspect Jokaste has gotten back in touch,” he says.

“Ah,” Damen says, and gets his feet on the ground.

Jord brings the messenger first.

She’s young, maybe twenty, her hair turned to thick ropes by dust and sweat, her legs lightly shaking.

“I see you didn’t waste time,” Laurent says, sitting down at their little table as Damen leans against the tentpole and smothers a cough in his elbow. Laurent kicks the other chair towards her with one bare foot. “Sit down before you fall down, thank you. Tell us what you have.”

The rider’s deference to monarchy wars quickly with her exhaustion and, equally quickly, loses. She drops to the chair without grace.

“The Lady Martine told us all on the Patran circuit to stop at Volsget’s mansion as often as we could without drawing suspicion,” the rider says, putting a bag atop the table and hurrying to pull from it a tight roll of papers. “She said if anything out of the ordinary should happen while we were there, we were to ride for you as fast as we could.”

“She told you where we would be?” Damen asks, thick arms crossed over his chest.

“She told us there would be a troop riding down the trade road,” the rider says, her shrug slightly helpless, her fists tight in her lap. “She didn’t mention your Majesties would be part of it.”

Damen snorts. Laurent holds out his hand. “The message,” he says.

“One of the men of the house gave it me while I was watering my horse,” the rider says as she peels one sheet from her roll of papers and quickly passes it over. “He wore the livery of the Governor’s personal guard.”

The paper is torn dramatically along one edge, ripped from someone’s ledger based on the shipping tallies printed in a neat hand across its face.

“Her powers of persuasion continue to astound,” Damen says, in a flat tone. “Did you see her or the child?”

“Lady Jokaste? No,” the rider replies, her nerves beginning to sound in the quaver of her voice, as Laurent reads and Damen watches. “Though I gossiped with the servants as much as I could, so that she might know you’re alive and well.”

Laurent stares at Jokaste’s handwriting, frowning.

“For now,” Damen says, as Laurent cuts in.

“This is in code,” he says in Akielon. The rider, a Veretian, blinks but remains otherwise still. “Damen, is this meant for you?”

He leans back in his chair, holding out the page. Damen takes it and angles it to catch the lantern light.

After a moment in which his face goes still and hard, Damen says, “Kastor and I used this as children. It’s an alphabet cipher— Kastor’s mother’s name is the key. I didn’t know Jokaste knew it.”

“Further evidence of her powers of persuasion?”

The line doesn’t land. Even the rider, staring politely into a corner, seems to wince.

“This says to be at the village of Imbros in five days’ time,” Damen says, reading slowly. “She’s added ‘please’ at the end.”

Laurent arches an eyebrow. “How long was the ride from Patras?” he asks the rider, slipping back into Veretian.

“I rode out five days ago, sire. In the morning.”

“So, five and a half let’s say. And how far are we from Imbros?”

“Not far,” Damen replies, “Maybe two hours’ ride.”

“No time to spare, then, but perhaps still time enough to make our rendezvous.”

“So we’re trusting her again,” Damen says. He says it like he’s doing Laurent a favor, like only by the sheer strength of his generosity does he not ask a question requiring answer.

Laurent answers him anyway. “As we have for the past two weeks, yes. Has your opinion of this plan recently changed?”

Damen meets Laurent’s eye, mouth closed, not even a muscle working in his jaw. The noise from beyond the tent is muffled and low, kept quiet by the night and the canvas.

“You can go,” Laurent says to the rider, breaking from Damen’s look. “Thank you for this. Find Commander Jord for a fresh horse and supplies.”

The rider stands and nods and bows, quick to make her exit. She leaves her cap on the table. Someone will have to return it to her later.

“I don’t like this either,” Laurent says, when it’s them again, alone, Damen’s gaze on him hazy and still. “You have to know I don’t like this.”

Damen remains quiet. He tends to, rather than say unkind things. It’s quite the trick.

When Laurent offers him nothing else, or perhaps when Damen feels he’s made his point, he says, “It could be a trap. Maybe not even Jokaste’s. We can’t know that someone else, someone from Volsget’s house didn’t see that note, or copy it, and break her code.”

“I think that’s why she said ‘please.’”

Damen sighs, rubbing the heel of his palm hard between his eyes. It means he has another headache. Laurent has learned this.

There is the knowledge, resting like a stone in his mouth, that he should tell Damen to stay behind. He should tell him to wait while Laurent takes Jord and Pallas and the spies and looks for Jokaste’s gift in Imbros. Damen is exhausted. He’s sick. Whatever Jokaste has risked another note to tell them about will be vital, and it will be pursued. The thought of Damen hurt— of Damen _more_ hurt, he amends with a certain dark humor, is unpleasant. It is to be avoided. And if he asks Damen to stay, Damen will go anyway and hate him for asking.

No, he won’t hate him. But he will hate _something_ , powerfully, with that same punishing tension that Laurent has seen in him every time he’s looked since they left Marlas.

They don't have time to hash it out, all this shit they aren't saying. The note crinkles in Damen’s grip.

“Do you think it's her that's there?” Damen asks. The shadows under his eyes are like smears of tar.

“No,” Laurent says, “She wouldn't plead for herself.”

Damen, surprised: “You think it's the child?”

That takes Laurent by surprise, too, but then the information processes. “I… do now,” he says, already rising. “Of course, it has to be, who else would she even consider risking herself for?”

“We have to go,” Damen says, unfolding his arms from his chest, stepping forward, putting the note to the table. “Now.”

There are shadows at the flap of the tent, Jord and the Thracian and the Barbinoise.

“Grab your sword,” Laurent says.

 

* * *

 

They add Pallas to their little group, at Laurent’s quiet request. If Damen notices he doesn't comment.

The ride south towards Imbros is almost easier in the night, with the heat of the sun beneath the world and a full moon picking out every stone in the road. It’s an old road, Artesian, and at its edges the paving has fallen away into disrepair, but the center is smooth as the day it was laid. They take it at a lope, with the owls calling like sentries before them.

“Volsget’s men are well armed and well trained,” the Thracian is shouting over the discord of hooves against stone. “Almost all of them served under him when Patras retook the Archipelago.”

“As tends our luck,” Laurent calls back. “How many can we expect?”

“In Patras he could send a troop with impunity, but here—”

Laurent feels the coil and burst of Tiffy’s great swift gait like it’s his own, their bodies together leaping a felled tree across the road, her snorting energy loosed from Laurent’s overbrimming reserves.

“His men trample my countryside,” Laurent says. “If only it were a full troop— I think then I might be forced to declare war.”

An hour into their ride they mount the crest of a rocky hill and a valley spills out before them. The old road follows the steep slope down and onwards, beside the deep-cut banks of a river and on through the dim, sleeping flicker of Imbros. Willows and poplars range across the valley, cut back from farmers’ fields and bunching tight around the town. The road ducks in and out of their branches, disappearing and reappearing like thread through weft.

Maybe halfway between Laurent and the walls of Imbros are Volsget’s men. They ride fast but steady, days from their last change of horses, with the sound of the hooves and armor ringing clear over the nightbirds of the valley.

“How many?” Damen asks, as he pulls his gelding to a stop beside Laurent. His breathing is labored, his deep voice heavy with it.

“Hard to say, sire,” Pallas replies, leaning out over the neck of his horse. “Eight, I think, but there could be more.”

Damen looks at Laurent. "How do you want to handle this?"

There are tracks running down the valley, splitting off from the road and curving beyond it towards Imbros, cutting sometimes through fields and orchards. Alternative routes, maybe, when the river floods and makes the road impassable.

"I want them back over the border by daybreak," Laurent says. "If we have to kill one or two of them, fine, but corpses are harder to repatriate."

"Capture one to question and send the rest running?" the Thracian suggests.

Damen’s got an eye on him. He looks sick, _he looks sick._ Laurent couldn’t avoid his silent urging if he had six different costumes and a doppelgänger.

“No,” Laurent says to the Thracian, with not a hint of audible reluctance, “the child is still unaccounted for. We don’t have time for an interrogation, unless they’re kind enough to answer questions while being routed.”

“If we can rout them,” Jord says, with a crease between his brows. “They do outnumber us.”

The riders aren’t subtle, loping through the valley. Dogs howl in their wake, faint orange lights blooming in the windows of homesteads.

“You’re right,” Laurent says, “we’ll need more men.”

And then, over a chorus of confused looks, he twists in his saddle and holds out a hand. “Alright, give me your cloaks, we’re going to have to do this quickly.”

 

* * *

 

“Halt!” Jord shouts, not a hundred yards from the wall of Imbros. “By order of the Kings’ Guard!”

Volsget's men are already turning. Laurent keeps his head down.

The moon has fallen beneath the valley rim, but starshine and the torches burning beside the town gates light the scene. Eight armored Patrans stare down eleven men of the Guard. Jord and Pallas sit astride their mounts at the front, with torchlight on their extremely recognizable breastplates. The spies wait just behind them with armor that is purposefully unrecognizable in every way, but at least is of very good quality.

Laurent (hooded), Damen (attempting to look unregal), and the five farmers they roused from their homes with the promise of royal favor and a very nice cloak, sit at the back.

Well, three farmers and two teenage farmers’ daughters. One of the two caught up with them riding bareback on a massive feathered plough horse, which Laurent thought showed sufficient enthusiasm for the whole thing.

The other—

“Is that girl on a _mule?”_ Damen hisses, leaning towards Laurent as Jord calls again to the soldiers.

“Notable in battle. Be quiet.” Volsget’s soldiers are parting, their lead rider coming forward.

“We are in the employ of the Patran ambassador,” the officer says. “We ride on diplomatic business.”

“You ride as accomplices to treason and insurrection,” Jord says. “You will turn for the border at once or your bodies will be sent back to your lord in pieces.”

The officer is a very poor bluffer. So is Jord. They eye each other suspiciously.

Laurent, all things being held equal, would much rather be up front, lying, than sitting in the back with Damen and the nervy farmers and the mule. But after five years on the throne his notoriety has gotten increasingly unmanageable and his hair no less blond. Staying hidden and letting Jord mangle his lines is, apparently, the safer option.

“This is an unforgivable breach of hospitality,” the officer says, with a probing uncertainty like he’d never realized one could just say words in whichever order one chose.

“You will ride for the border at once,” Jord replies, again, having found a good thing and sticking to it.

“Laurent,” Damen says, low, as nobody rides for the border and the Barbinoise, near the trees, silently draws her sword. “You understand that half of our fighters cannot actually fight for us, correct?”

“Don’t discount them all. Notice that man’s hay fork?”

One of the soldiers is pointing now, half-hidden in her officer’s shadow, whispering to the rider beside her. She’s looking at the mule.

_“Laurent.”_

Jord and the officer are back to eyeing each other, like two old hounds circling the same scrap of rotten meat. Jord has his hand on his sword hilt.

“Fine,” Laurent snaps, and tears back his hood.

“I am Laurent the Sixth!” he shouts, as Tiffy rears and whinnies and parts their little crowd like water, “King of Vere and Acquitart, Protector of Delfeur, King Consort of Akielos, Defender of the Alliance!”

There’s another strangled _Laurent!_ noise behind him. He’s already at the fore, staring down the shocked officer.

“Your master conspires against my house and sends soldiers across my lands,” he says, pulling Tiffy’s head back until she arches her neck and stomps fitfully at the ground. His voice carries across the road, through the trees, up over the town walls, where curious figures are gathering atop the ramparts. “Leave now, if you value your lives.”

He holds himself like his mother held herself, like Damen holds himself, like his memory of his brother. An old trick, but one that’s never failed him. The officer’s eyes dart from Laurent to Jord to the ‘Guard’ and back. His horse moves nervously from foot to foot.

And then the rider in the back shouts, “But, sir, it’s a _mule—”_ and the officer says, head tall and shoulders back, “The Kings of Vere and Akielos are away hunting in the north. Your tricks will not work on us, bandits!”

Someone hoots from the town wall.

Well.

“We will not be swayed from our diplomatic duties by thieves and scavengers,” the officer says, on a roll. “Stand aside!”

Laurent sighs, taking a moment to pinch at the bridge of his nose. Truly, Martine’s little explanation for their disappearance from court has reached far and wide. Very far. Extremely wide.

“That's enough,” Laurent says, cutting over the officer before he can get started again, “I am King. They are the Kings’ Guard. The Patran ambassador isn’t even in court. And if you won’t believe me,” he says, nodding at the town gates, “I’d suggest believing them.”

The officer twists in his saddle. The gates are open, townspeople beginning to gather at their mouth. Some, watchmen and old soldiers, have swords. Others have hay forks. They know who Laurent is.

A figure in the back chances a wave.

“You are Governor Volsget’s soldiers, dispatched from his seat at Tenfleet Bay,” Laurent tells the riders, who have begun to look urgently amongst themselves. “You’ve ridden here quickly, in search of a child. You will return to the Governor without him, or you will not return at all. Do you understand?”

More urgent looks. Another soldier stands sideways in his stirrups to whisper in the officer’s ear.

“I—” The officer has one hand on his sword, fist just beginning to close.

Damen is beside Laurent, sword unsheathed across his pommel. Pallas’ catches the torchlight.

“You will not find what you've come here for,” Laurent says. “Leave.”

The officer’s eyes dart once, fleetingly, to the trees.

And then his hand drops loose to his side.

“As you say, sir,” he says, and Laurent exhales. Shallowly, he doubts the motion was even visible under his leather cuirass, but he feels it silently echoed in Damen and Jord and all the rest of them, arrayed out on the road behind him.

“My men will escort you across the border,” Laurent says, waving a hand that encompasses all members of their troop that are not Damen silently suppressing a cough or a farmer yawning into her cloak. They’ll have to meet back up with the rest of the company somewhere along the trade road once they’re done. Unless they’re a farmer.

The officer nods. The townspeople have inched forward, bringing light with them. It gleams off the hilt of the officer’s sword, beneath the shadow of his arm.

“We will inform the Governor of what has happened,” the officer says, less a warning than a courtesy. There is another dim flash behind him, a sword being returned to its sheath. Laurent finds himself watching it, brow furrowing.

“Sir—” the officer says, and Laurent’s eyes are quicker than his mind, so that he doesn’t know what he’s seeing until he says, “Your weapons—” and doesn’t know what it means until he says: “They’re Veretian.”

It’s like a horn, like a bell, like the sound of good Veretian steel being pulled from a Patran sheath.

Damen inhales. The officer’s eyes dart to the side.

And then the Barbinoise screams and pitches forward and shouts, _“Archer!”_ and it all turns to ruin.

“Alive!” Laurent roars, “I want them _alive!”_

There must have been one more, one they couldn’t see from the hills. Scouting ahead or behind, waiting for a signal, waiting for Laurent to say the wrong thing. That paid off well, didn't it. The farmers turn and bolt, cloaks streaming behind them. Volsget’s officer surges forward, sword raised, and Laurent meets it, badly, hemmed in by a dozen riders and their frantic horses. Close combat, with swords, on horseback, is misery. When the officer moves to strike again, Damen is at the man’s side and stabbing through his ribs.

“Was I unclear?” Laurent shouts as the officer slumps from his horse, sword clattering to the ground. Damen ignores him, already given over to the brutality of the fight. And then another soldier appears, horse rearing between them, and they’re separated.

It becomes a game of who can stay horsed long enough run a sword through their enemy’s neck. Tiffy, trained for combat, rolls her eyes and pins back her ears but stays otherwise calm under Laurent as men scream and horses buck and arrows zip past from some amateur archer on top of the wall who probably thinks they’re helping. Through the madness of it, Laurent can almost track his men. A soldier on foot swings for Laurent’s thigh and Laurent bashes his pommel into her temple until she drops to the ground and Tiffy can leap forward over the body and Laurent can see.

Damen on foot, his back to his gelding, the creature struggling up from the road. Two soldiers, one horsed, advance on him. Jord and Pallas still on their mounts, Pallas pulling his sword from a soldier’s gut, Jord chopping through his neck. He can’t see the spies at all until— no, there, the Barbinoise on foot at the crumbling edge of the road, her back splashed with blood, cutting her blade across a horse’s legs. The horse goes down screaming, its rider beneath it.

And then there’s another sword swinging at Laurent’s head and he devotes himself to the unfortunate necessity of violence.

It’s as Laurent is bracing his foot in the stirrup to free his sword from whatever bone it's caught on in his would-be attacker’s chest cavity that he hears the scream.

 _“Sire—!”_ cut off, and then shouting. He drops the sword and pulls hard at the reins.

By the time he’s there, by the time he can see, Damen has killed the last soldier and gotten his hands on Jord’s side. Blood pours between his fingers. Jord lies crumpled on the road, chest heaving and eyes closed.

“It was meant for me,” Damen says as Laurent dismounts and tears off his cloak, the only one they have left, and presses it in a ball to Jord’s side. His voice sounds so strange to Laurent. “I was too slow. He took it for me.”

 _I was too slow._ It rings in Laurent’s head, like it rings in Damen’s. He knew this would happen, didn’t he? He knew someone would get hurt. He knew that.

Damen looks stricken, hollowed out, his face gray and sheened with sweat. Laurent can feel the panic waiting for him, but he pushes it back, brings it to heel. Later, it can come. When the work is done.

“He is a loyal man of the Guard,” Laurent says, and then shouts towards the town gates, where some people still remain, “Get us a surgeon!”

“We— we have no surgeon!” one voice calls back, hidden by the night and the crowd.

“A seamstress, then! Anyone who can use a needle!”

“Laurent,” Damen says, with the monster’s claws in his back, and Laurent puts a hand, quick and bloodied, to his jaw.

“Not now,” he says, holding Damen’s gaze. “Any time else, but not now.”

Damen’s eyes are on him, desperate, for just a moment, and then he nods. He keeps pressure on Jord’s side. Laurent stands.

The night is dark. The moon is beneath the horizon, the stars covered by growing clouds, and the dawn far off. Low noises of pain and injury surround Laurent, from Jord and what few soldiers remain alive of Volsget’s troop. Eight enemy bodies he counts, breathing and still. The same number they saw from the hill— where's the ninth? Pallas has rounded up their horses, giving their reins to whoever among the villagers will hold them. Laurent calls him over.

“He needs Paschal,” he says, voice low, stepping away from Damen and Jord and their single hunched form. “Get what canvas and rope they’ll give you and make a litter between the horses. Once he’s stitched up enough to last the ride, you need to get him on the road.”

“Yes, your Majesty,” Pallas says, and then, seeming to work himself up to the daring of a direct question: “You aren’t coming with us?”

“No,” Laurent says, “after all this, we still haven’t found the child.”

“Aye, sire,” Pallas nods, making no note of his King’s tone. “And what would you like us to do about Lykinos?”

“What about him?” Laurent says after a pause, tearing his eyes from Damen. Then: “Who?”

“Uh, the spy, sire,” Pallas says. “The Akielon. Had the broken nose.” He waves a hand over the straight jut of his own. “He’s dead.”

It takes Laurent a moment. The night has been long, the month longer. Neither is yet done.

“The Thracian,” he says.

Pallas nods. Wonderful.

“Where?”

The body is at the edge of the road, where long poplar roots have grown untended and pushed the stone blocks up in broken waves. His nose was indeed crooked, Laurent notes, looking down at him. And his hair kept short in the military style. Sword calluses on his hands, a long scar on his forearm where he might once have caught a blade swinging for his skull. A soldier then, maybe even an officer, before Martine recruited him for her purposes. Apparently, his name was Lykinos.

A sword caught him in the back, ripping down from shoulder to spine. His body is open to the night, cracked and pulled wide, like the dark shell of a nut.

“He was attacked.”

Laurent looks up. The Barbinoise stands next to him, blood slowly wicking down her shirt.

“I can see that,” Laurent says.

The Barbinoise doesn’t look like a soldier. She looks like Martine. Like a woman who, some years ago, found herself in a place she did not expect and made herself the best of it. She’s older than Damen. Her long hair, braided tight at the back of her head, shines with unexpected silver.

“What’s your name?” Laurent asks.

“Alienor, your Majesty.” Her features are strong, almost dramatic, the sharp line of her cheekbones dropping away like a high cliff to her blood-splattered jaw.

“Alienor,” he says. “Find someone to bury him.”

“Yes, sire,” she replies, as Laurent turns away.

Pallas has gotten his rope and his canvas. He’s laying them out on the road with one of the villagers, debating methods of suspension. Another small group encircles Jord, one holding high a torch, another with cloth and a bowl of water, another kneeling beside Laurent’s commander with her needle and thread. Damen watches from the side. Beside him, likely having tried to speak to her King and failed utterly to get his attention, is someone who looks very much like she might have what Laurent needs.

“You,” Laurent says at her side, making her turn with a start. “Are you Mayor in this town?”

“I— we don’t have a mayor, your Majesty—”

“Mayor, prefect, headwoman, whichever. Do you know where everyone tends to be?”

“Ah, yes, your Majesty.” She’s an older woman, someone’s grandmother. She holds herself very carefully next to Laurent. He must look more carnivorous than he’d thought.

“We’re looking for a child,” he says, as the woods rustle and the stars flow, now hidden, above their heads. “Five years old, a boy. We don’t know who he’s traveling with, but they’ll have come from Patras.”

The grandmother glances at the dead soldiers, strewn about in their Patran armor, but her calm expression is unmoved. “All the children in town are ours, your Majesty,” she says, “though I won’t say it’s impossible to hide such a child in an inn or camp where we might not notice, if he were quiet.”

Laurent feels an unspeakable need to run an exhausted hand through his hair. “And who has been through town in the past day or two?” he asks, clasping his hands at the small of his back. “Any soldiers, any strange groups of riders?”

“No soldiers,” the woman says, “but we lie not far from the trade roads. Caravans come and go all the time.”

“They come and go,” Laurent repeats, and then, seizing on it, “—and which ones have gone? Did any leave in the night? Even with rooms open in the inn?”

He had been expecting messengers, was the thing. A few riders perhaps, the child light enough that a horse wouldn’t be slowed by the extra weight. Who else could have made the ride from Tenfleet Bay in five days, in the time between Jokaste writing the note and Damen reading it aloud?

But… perhaps she sent the child before she wrote the note. Perhaps she had not expected both Damen and Laurent to leave Marlas— perhaps the note was exactly as pleading as it seemed, an act of desperation when she realized no one she trusted— _when no one she trusted_ would be in Marlas to receive the child.

Perhaps she got her child onto a trading caravan a week ago, weeks ago, when she wrote her first note. Entrusting him to their care.

“There, your Majesty!” the woman is saying, one arm raised towards the hills behind the village. “I saw them with their horses still yoked as the moon was rising, that’s them climbing the slope now.”

A mere speck of light, climbing slowly upwards. The idea, just the shadow, that there could be wagons and horses behind.

Laurent moves around the woman, forward, and gets his hand on Damen’s shoulder.

“Up,” he says. “I know where the child is.”

 

* * *

 

There is a moment, when Damen’s pulling himself into the saddle, when he drops back to the ground and hisses, rubbing his hands against his legs.

“No, it’s fine, I’m fine,” he says, when Laurent jerks Tiffy around, too fast, making her neck curve sharply towards the rein. Damen shows Laurent his palms, missing a layer of skin and oozing blood. “I scraped them when I got bucked. That’s all.”

It isn’t. Damen’s eyes are glassy, his hands faintly shaking. A fight of minutes took more from him than a day on the battlefield. Laurent must tell him to stay behind. It’s no longer a choice. But when he finds the words, opening his mouth to say, “Damen—” he’s cut off.

Damen swings up into the saddle. “I’m fine,” he says, shaking his head like he’s only tired, not exhausted, not poisoned. In the end, Laurent has neither the strength nor wisdom to insist. They take off towards the hills.

When the sky has begins to lighten, so incremental a change it seems almost a dream, Damen begins to cough. Infrequently, but difficult to stifle, unlike anything that could come from a common cold. The hacking sound lodges somewhere right beneath Laurent’s arm, digging deeper with every motion, questing needle-like through his flesh until it may finally stop his heart. And then they clear the lip of the valley, and the grey sky opens before them. And they see the caravan.

The wagons move slowly, and they do not overtake them quickly. Tiffy is flagging, head drooping, and Laurent with her. Damen coughs again, a horse length behind. As they begin to pass the wagons, one by one, few heads rise to track their passage. The ones that do are wan and slow to show surprise.

The sky brings light but no color, shadows without depth. When they finally reach the lead wagon, the driver signals a stop.

“Your Majesties,” the driver says, as the call echoes back down the line, too loud a noise for so flat a dawn.

“You were to meet us in Marlas,” Laurent says. His voice is harsh in his throat, a sword pulled from a cracked and flaking sheath.

“Yes, your Majesties,” the driver replies. “She said it might not all go according to plan, though.”

“Lady Jokaste,” Damen says. His voice rasps, too, but deeper, the blade as weak as the leather.

The driver nods. A woman is climbing down from the wagon behind him, accepting a slumped shape into her arms. The shape has skinny brown legs, and a mop of curly dark hair.

“Is the rest of your company close?” the driver asks, perhaps wondering if they will even be able to carry the child home. Not a ridiculous question.

“He will be safe with us,” Laurent replies.

The driver frowns at that, some question in the wrinkle of his brow, but then the woman stops beside the great tired horses and the shape in her arms sits up and says, “Oh!”

Laurent looks, and looks, and keeps looking.

“But she’s a girl,” the driver says, as the girl, curls falling down to her shoulders, big blue eyes staring up at these two haggard men on horseback staring down at her, says, “I’m Theomache of Ios. Mama told me to wait for the Kings. Is that you?”

 _“Theomache?”_ Damen says, the shock in his voice almost painful. He’s coughing again immediately, eyes fixed to the girl even as he covers his mouth with his shaking arm.

“Jokaste had a son,” Laurent says. He feels dissected, split apart, his mouth a separate animal from the brain behind it. “A prince, born on the border. Was there another child?”

The girl— her name is _Theomache_ , she is named for her _grandfather—_ is shaking her head. “I didn’t want to be a son anymore,” she says. “Are you the Kings?”

“Yes,” Laurent says, though he’s perhaps never felt less like it. His eyes are grit, his mouth is sand. His body aches from the fight, the ride, the long week before it. “We—”

Laurent doesn’t honestly know if it’s his own perception, drawing everything slow with horror and fatigue, or if it’s simply how the motion takes him. Damen’s coughing is fitful, unending, his eyes twisted shut as Laurent turns away from the driver and his heir and the noise of his husband struggling to inhale becomes the only thing he can hear. Damen curls further over the saddle, and then further, his back bending. And all of it is still so slow. Laurent thinks he might reach out and just pluck the sickness from Damen’s throat, if only he could move.

And then it goes quickly. And between one serrated inhale and the next, Damen slumps from his saddle and lands shoulder-first in the dirt.

It is a long, shameful breath before Laurent can understand what has happened and leap from his horse. “Is that man sick?” says a small voice as Laurent gets his hands on Damen’s pain-twisted face and begins, uselessly, to shout.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> damen's horse's name means 'blond.' [let me tell u why.](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com/private/image/164077406746/tumblr_oujoajYviE1r74mdf)
> 
> on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com) and twitter @[lambergeier,](http://twitter.com/lambergeier) get at me


	4. Chapter 4

Laurent holds Damen’s palm in his hands, running his fingertips over the ragged skin.

“How could you not notice?” he asks. They sit together in one of the wagons. Dawn is breaking.

“All of me hurts,” Damen says. His voice is little more than a rumble. “How was I supposed to know this was the ache that was killing me?”

Between the scabs and the oozing scrapes, the skin of his palm is faintly pink. Like a burn, straight across the flesh.

“But it’s been days,” Laurent says. “Almost a week since we set out.”

“I’m sorry,” Damen says, which finally makes Laurent stop.

There’s noise outside, the traders tying a length of rope to the bridle of Damen’s gelding. His reins are wrapped in cloth, bundled into a saddlebag with some food and water and a change of clothes for Theomache. Neither Damen nor Laurent have the coin to repay them, so Laurent will give them his cuirass before they leave. It will sell well.

“When we get back,” Laurent says.

“You know it wasn’t him,” Damen says. “It couldn’t have been.”

Laurent doesn’t reply. He curls Damen’s fingers gently out, sees the burn echoed there in amorphous pink stripes. “Hello,” says a voice, then, “Good morning. When are we going?”

Laurent looks up. The fog is heavy, making the long summer grasses bend under its weight. Theomache stands at the rear of the wagon, her small hand enclosed by the caravan driver’s.

“Good morning,” Laurent tells her. “We’ll leave soon, as soon as the horses are ready. Did you say hello to them?”

“Yes,” Theomache says, nodding seriously. “I liked Tiffy, even though she was really big and tried to eat my hair. Am I going to ride her?”

“Yes,” Laurent says, leaning forward. He offers her a hand up, which she takes without hesitation. The driver lets her go. “You’ll be with me. Will that be alright?”

Theomache nods. She climbs into the wagon.

Damen is silent. He doesn’t look up.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps an hour into their slow walk back to the trade road, they make the decision to tie Damen to his horse.

Later again, among the valley willows, they find the guardswoman sent to find them. She’s slightly frantic.

Finally, plodding up the far hills and out of the valley, Theomache falls asleep. She had been telling them all the story of Eperitus and the Cyclops. Laurent holds her body against his with one hand, the other holding loose to the reins as Tiffy wearily bears them on. Thus they return to camp, not much less than a day after they left it, with the sun burning down across the sky behind them. The guardswoman rode ahead, and so a small, worried host meets them just before the tents.

“Your Majesty,” Paschal says, with something almost like relief rippling through his usual stillness as he jogs forward. There’s blood on his sleeves, dry and dark. The rest of their little troop swarms up behind him, one talking quickly with the guardswoman, another few steadying Damen’s horse as they cut their King from his saddle. Damen’s dismount is slow, like a fall, and he drops an arm over Lazar’s shoulders as another coughing fit bubbles from his chest and his sweat-dark gelding is led away.

Paschal has a hand on Tiffy’s shoulder, just in front of Laurent’s knee. “You were right,” Laurent tells him. “Damianos has been poisoned every day since we left Marlas.”

Paschal’s eyes go a little wide. His mouth falls a little open. Laurent watches it at a remove, with Theomache warm and breathing softly against his front.

“You— how?” Paschal says.

Laurent feels it in his palms, the ghost of another body’s ache.

“It was on his horse’s reins,” he says, with the sky purpling like a bruise above them, the cicadas high and thrumming. “It was worked into the leather.”

He should have seen it sooner.

Up above the valley, with the land flattening before them, it had suddenly become obvious. He’d pulled the bridle from the gelding’s head as one of the caravan’s passengers had poured boiled water over Damen’s torn hands. The leather of the reins had still been soft with oil. They’d been recently cared for. He’d wiped them with a rag, then set fire to the rag with the driver’s flint, then watched it burn in a burst of dark, pungent smoke before the oil was gone and only the smoldering cloth remained. Only the cloth and the smell and Damen’s racking coughs, splitting the pre-dawn air like stakes through the earth.

“It will have been in the oil used by the groom,” he says to Paschal, here, now. “A sediment, most likely. Innocuous to the unsuspecting eye.”

“Leaching every day through his skin,” Paschal says, his face settling as an answer is provided, a solution perhaps made possible.

Laurent nods tightly. “He fell in the fight last night, scraping his hands. When we rode afterwards to find the child—”

“It got into his blood. Quickly.”

He had seen Damen rubbing his hands against his thighs every day, hadn’t he? As if he were merely wiping off the sweat. What else had been beneath Laurent’s attention? A cough he’d thought the product of dust? The paling burns across his husband’s palms?

“Can I get down?” says a voice, and Laurent must suppress his jolt of surprise as Theomache leans suddenly sideways, ducking from his hold. She does that, Laurent is coming to learn. Asking for things only once she is well past the point of being stopped.

Paschal hurries to help her down and she looks at him curiously as he does. At his face, his finely made clothes, the red-brown splatters down his sleeve. “And you are, er—” Paschal begins, in vain.

“This is Theomache of Ios,” Laurent says, “Lady Jokaste’s daughter.”

The surprise shows on Paschal’s face for only a moment. He is, ultimately, as adaptable as any of them who remember life in the Regent’s court.

“A pleasure to meet you, my lady,” Paschal says, bowing over Theomache’s hand in his. It brings his head almost level with hers. She watches him sharply and forgets to return his bow.

“Is there anyone who can watch her while I see to the rest of this?” Laurent asks Paschal as he finally dismounts, feeling the painful thump of it shoot through his knees.

“I need to attend to King Damianos—”

Laurent is already waving a tired hand. This is obvious.

“—but I know young Felix is good with children. Perhaps he—”

Laurent waves his hand again and there is a stiff twist to it this time, one that makes his wrist pop dully, like stones skipped together. “No,” he says.

Paschal’s eyes move quickly, between Laurent’s horse, then Damen’s, distant, making the connection, then back to Laurent. Laurent thinks, just for a moment, that Paschal might say something, might, like Damen, lodge some quiet protest, but he doesn’t. That’s not how he conceives of his role.

“I have a few of the men readying Jord to be taken back to Marlas,” Paschal says. “Perhaps one of them can be spared.”

Laurent nods. “See to it, would you.” Felix is at the edge of camp, with one of the soldiers, fussing over Damen’s horse. Laurent can almost see his face.

“Are you going?” Theomache says, with a child’s solemnity, and Laurent pauses.

She’s staring up at him, frowning just slightly. Paschal still has her hand, though she appears about as interested in him as she does the dirt of the road.

It makes his knees ache, and his thighs, most every part of him below the waist protesting the motion, when he squats in front of her. She’s going to be tall, he thinks, looking up.

“Just for now,” he says, raising a hand. “May I touch you?” She nods, and he tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. It’s a shade lighter than Damen’s, though just as thick. “Pallas and Lazar are good men. They’ll look after you until I’m done. Try not to give them too much trouble.”

Her round face splits in a grin, appreciation for the acknowledgement of her skills. “What are you gonna do?” she asks.

“I need to talk to a groom,” he tells her. “Nothing very interesting at all.”

She seems determined to question him further, but Paschal is already, gently, pulling her away. He has his own urgent responsibilities. Theomache twists around as she’s led off, staring imploringly, but Laurent only waves. She pouts and returns it. Laurent looks toward the edge of camp.

Felix is there, with the horses, brushing them down. Laurent starts towards him.

 

* * *

 

He was the last person to touch Damen’s tack before they set out. In the end, there’s nothing else to say.

Laurent returns to his and Damen’s tent with a sword in hand. He’d taken it from Pallas, who took it from the road outside Imbros. Damen is alone inside, lying on his side in their bed with a cup held loosely in one hand, Paschal already gone.

Damen took the fall from his saddle on his shoulder. Deep black bruise stretches down almost to his elbow, visible like a stain in the lamplight. His breath is shallow and faintly wheezing. He looks up slowly when Laurent enters.

“Felix is gone,” Laurent says, before Damen can ask him. “On his way back to Marlas. He claimed the reins had already been oiled when he last cleaned your tack.” Another preemptive answer.

“Alright,” Damen says after a moment, sounding tired. And hoarse. And resigned. “Was he alright?”

“Well, I didn’t kill him,” Laurent says, and doesn’t realize he’s snarled it until Damen heaves himself up and glares.

“Here,” Laurent says, before Damen can start in on him, shoving the sword into his hands. “This was taken off of one of Volsget’s men. Look familiar?”

Damen sighs, and sets his cup down on the carpet floor of the tent, and pulls the sword from its sheath in a clumsy movement. Night fell properly well over an hour ago, a clear, hot darkness that makes Laurent prickle with sweat in his day-old clothes. The moonlight out between the tents had been strong and silvery, polished to shine, but inside the tent the stifling air is almost rusty. The only light comes from the two old field lamps set on the table and hung from the crosspole.

Laurent preferred the moonlight. It had seemed fitting. Like there had been no break between this night and this day and the night before: just one long, pearly stretch of light, shining down upon the sleepless miles of road.

“It’s Veretian,” Damen is saying, voice worn through like a kitchen rag. “Like you said.” He angles the blade against the lamplight, brow slowly creasing. “I could swear I’ve seen this style before, but there’s no smith’s mark. I can’t tell who made it.”

“Nor can I,” Laurent replies. “Apparently, one of my nobles is arming the Governor and would really rather I not know.”

Damen’s mouth goes tight at the corners, tighter still when he must resheathe the sword. He’s having trouble raising his bruised arm. Laurent watches, keeping himself still.

“So it’s a conspiracy,” Damen says, handing the sword back to Laurent. He’s coughing into the back of his other hand. Laurent drops the sword on the table and sits across from him, pulling a chair over the carpet. “Volsget holds Jokaste and her child captive, or just Jokaste now, and gets good Veretian steel in return. I assume he’s plotting against—who, Torgeir?”

Laurent nods. “There have been rumblings of rebellion since at least autumn. Martine and I were under the impression that they wouldn’t be of any serious consequence for another four or five years, which we thought more than enough time for Torgeir to behead whichever of his governors seemed most inspired.”

He sighs, drawing one knee up and crossing his arms atop it. The position is slightly more of a stretch than it was when he was twenty. “Martine and I obviously need to improve our soothsaying,” he says. “Volsget is already well-armed. If he’s getting more weapons from Vere, his rebellion is not far off.”

“Any idea who’s sending him the weapons?”

For a moment, Laurent is quiet. _Absolutely none at all_ is such a hateful thing to say, but what else is there? Maybe if he were back at court, with Martine, with their informants, he could make a guess. A good one, even. But after more than a week on the road, sweat and dirt and blood ground into his itching clothing, Damen watching him with heavy eyes, both of them trying so hard to ignore the coughing that hasn’t quite stopped: he’s got nothing. It’s like the sore stretch of his shoulders, the sharp twinge in his back that tells him he’s sat hunched over his own knee for too long.

He hasn’t felt outflanked in so many years. He’s out of practice.

“Absolutely none at all,” he says to Damen. “At least not right now. It’s too great an expense for most of our usual agitators. They do enjoy their little opulences.”

His voice is almost airy, which is embarrassing.

Damen is looking at the carpet, at the little humps and valleys where it covers over the dirt. “So you’re saying,” he starts, rubbing slowly over the scabby messes of his palms, covered now by clean bandage, “that whoever’s slowly poisoning me and framing Jokaste and arming a foreign rebellion— is _committed_ to it.”

“Yes,” Laurent says, after a long moment.

Damen nods, still staring at something very far away. His shoulders are hitching again, suppressing a cough, and— they aren’t so far apart. Laurent unbends and leans down, picking up Damen’s cup. It’s only water. He presses it into Damen’s hands.

“We’ll send word back with Jord to Marlas,” he says. He’s so tired. He feels it like manacles, chaining him hand and foot. “Perhaps Martine and Nikandros can do something with the information. It won’t help us here—” _It won’t stop you from being poisoned_ “—but they have more resources to hand than us.”

“You’ve spoken with Jord?”

“Yes. He reminded me to play cards with you every once in awhile, lest you get bored.”

Damen smiles crookedly. It looks a bit like a grimace. “So he’s fit to ride?”

“Fit enough,” Laurent says. “Paschal would much rather see him on a slow, comfortable ride back to Marlas than trying to maintain our pace.”

“And who’s going with him?” He still won’t look at Laurent.

“Adenet. The rather musclebound one.”

He’s trying to make Damen smile again, to nod, to look up. It’s almost childish.

Finally, Damen raises his head, his face still. He says, “So how many others are you going to send away tonight?”

Laurent freezes.

“Or have you sent them away already?”

“I’m _sorry?”_ Laurent says.

“I’m not attacking you,” Damen says, despite all evidence to the contrary. “But I need to know how many people you’re going to turn off tonight because you think they poisoned me.”

“Is there some _upper limit_ to possible regicides I don’t know about?” Laurent snaps. He hadn’t expected to be this angry, but he should have. It’s been hounding him for hours, he realizes, since this morning in the hills, since Jord fell and the Thracian died on the side of a crumbling road.

“Laurent, we can’t do this alone,” Damen goes on, so dogged it sets Laurent’s teeth on edge. “Volsget is dangerous, and we didn’t bring many men to start with. With Jord and Adenet gone, Lykinos dead, and Alienor injured we can’t—” he pauses, bandaged hands flexing in his lap. “ _I_ can’t—”

He cuts off, exhaling shakily. “I'm no good to you like this,” he says.

He speaks it like it’s been carved from him. Like it’s cost him in blood.

“I can barely stand,” Damen says, “I can’t ride without being tied down, I can barely _breathe._ I can’t _help you.”_ He’s staring at his hands again. Laurent is staring at him. “And if I were anyone else, if you weren’t terrified of letting me out of your sight, you’d dump me in the nearest village and ride as fast as you _should_ be riding to get Jokaste.”

“That’s not—” Laurent starts, with force, but Damen waves him off, like they’re getting distracted from some greater point. Laurent feels cold all over, despite the heat, despite the summer, sapped of vital substance as he watches Damen drag a hand through his hair with that little grim laugh again.

Laurent wishes suddenly that he were someone else, someone who knew what to do with another’s flagrant misery. Someone who wasn’t always, in that first moment, frozen by it.

He doesn’t pull it together in time. “Laurent,” Damen says, in that voice like he loves him, despite it all. “I cannot force you to trust these people who have all sworn on their lives to protect us. I’ve tried. And I know one of them is poisoning me, I _know,”_ he says, when Laurent starts to speak again, “but sending them all away won’t help us, either.”

Laurent understands, between one breath and the next, that Damen hates this, too. He hates it in that gut-deep way he hates all treachery, can’t stand the thought that one of their men is doing this to him. But still he says:

“I’m asking you.” With his dark eyes on Laurent. “Just until we can make it home. Trust them just a bit longer. Some of them. Please.”

He’s been asking this for so long. For years and years. First for himself, then the rest of them. Nikandros, Martine. Felix, who had cried and cried. _Please, Laurent, trust people._

He’d honestly thought he was getting better.

“I can’t,” Laurent says. It’s raw in his throat. “Not like you want. Felix is already gone. Symonne, she’s been acting as quartermaster, and the wagon driver, Eukles— I have to send them off in the morning. They’ve had too much access to the supplies. I can’t risk it. I—”

He cuts himself off. He refuses to babble. Not when this is all so clumsy already, like he’s been told to perform surgery with a woodcutter’s axe.

“Anyone else?” Damen asks, with lamplight flickering across his sallow skin.

 _All of them,_ Laurent wants to say. “No,” he says instead. “But Pallas and Paschal are going through our supplies. Anything they’re not sure about we’re going to leave on the side of the road.”

“If any of that stuff’s poisoned, it could be dangerous for whoever comes after us—”

Laurent’s voice comes out clipped. “We do not have the time.”

“Alright,” Damen says, and then, “You’re right, alright.” He runs a hand through his hair.

“You’re wearing your prince clothes,” Damen says, a little slowly, after a moment. It’s what he calls Laurent’s older outfits, the ones he grew up wearing, the ones he wore when they met. “You’ve been wearing them for days, haven’t you?”

Laurent nods, stiff-necked.

Damen rattles out a sigh and it seems to expel something. To release the tent’s hot air from its stillness.

“Get over here,” he says, holding out a hand, and then when Laurent doesn’t move: “I’m not angry, I swear, I just can’t stand not touching you anymore. Feels like it’s been years.”

“I seem to recall having my hands all over you just this morning,” Laurent replies, a little prim, but already rising. He perches beside Damen at the edge of the bed, too tired to try and disguise his own ridiculous caution.

“Doesn’t count,” Damen says. “No kissing.” The pads of his fingers are hot against Laurent’s jaw. Laurent doesn’t know what they’ll do if he has a fever, what they’ll do if the fever gets worse.

Damen’s thumb is moving softly against his cheek. Laurent closes his eyes. “Hey,” Damen says, his voice like a rumble, and presses his lips to Laurent’s.

The first kiss is long and slow. So is the second. Some tight-wound something begins to unspool in Laurent’s chest, encouraged by their soft intermingling of breaths as Damen exhales, pulls away, leans in again.

In… some other context, Damen would be offering him comfort. Laurent knows this. He would be telling Laurent that everything is alright. Or that everything will be alright. Laurent might be doing the same. But they don’t, now. Or they can’t. It’s the same. And yet Laurent thinks Damen might be taking some comfort anyways, as he guides Laurent’s head with a gentle pressure, as his days-old stubble rubs in a warm burr against Laurent’s chin.

This won’t help them. This won’t solve any of their problems, this won’t save them. But Damen’s other hand has found its way to Laurent’s thigh, and Damen lifts it gently, deposits it carefully over his own lap. It’s not an act of passion. They don’t have the energy for that. But it brings them closer.

Damen’s hand runs in long strokes from Laurent’s knee to almost his hip. It’s nice.

“Er, Exalted?” calls a voice, Lazar, from just outside the tent. “Your Majesty?”

“Of course,” Laurent says, softly, as Damen drops his head to Laurent’s shoulder with a weak laugh. “Come in!” he calls back.

Lazar ducks in, a bit burdened. He’s got a pallet and blanket rolled up under one arm and Theomache slumped and snoring, precariously balanced, in the other.

Laurent stands to help, letting Damen’s hands slide from his body. He takes the pallet and lays it out as Lazar gets a better hold of Theomache and then, gently sets her down. She’d passed out nearly in the middle of telling the men some grand story about the most cunning of all heroes, Lazar tells them.

“She’s fond of that one,” Laurent says with a small smile, as Lazar bows shortly and takes his leave. Theomache snores through the lot of it. Laurent kneels, and, carefully, tucks back a lock of hair from where it had fallen across her mouth.

“Her name is Theomache,” Damen says behind him.

“Yes, I think we knew that already,” Laurent replies, a little distracted. Theomache’s young still, but Laurent can almost see who she’ll become in the shape of her features. Her nose, her brow, the softened angle of her jaw.

Damen’s voice is strange. He should have heard it.

“What do you think the odds are,” he says, “that her mother first named her Theomedes?”

Laurent looks up sharply. “Damen—” he starts.

“Jokaste named her child after my father,” Damen says, unmoved. He’s staring at Theomache, at her small form curled up under the blanket, beneath the canvas. “After the man she poisoned in his own bed.”

“Damen—” Laurent is standing.

He says, “She looks like her. She looks like her mother.”

 _She looks like you_ , Laurent doesn’t say, and because he doesn’t say it he finds he can’t say anything, and then Damen turns his head away.

 

* * *

 

He’s getting worse at waking up.

“Are you asleep?” whispers a quiet voice very close to Laurent’s ear.

“No,” Laurent sighs, lying. He opens his eyes.

Theomache is crouched by the side of the camp bed, chin nearly perched on the sheets, expression slightly wild.

“What’s wrong, Theomache?” Laurent asks, feeling especially virtuous in his patience. The night is deep, the hour late. Theomache is little more than a collection of frowning shadows at his bedside.

“...Had a bad dream,” Theomache says, mumbling it into the sheets, then darting her eyes up as if unsure of how Laurent will react.

Laurent closes his eyes, wishes passionately for just one full night of sleep, then opens them again. “I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like to stay up a bit with me?”

Theomache nods, a little solemn.

“Alright,” he says. “Give me one moment to get dressed and we can go outside.”

“Outside?” she asks.

“Damianos is sleeping,” Laurent tells her, very quiet. “I don’t want to wake him.”

Four times tonight, Damen woke Laurent. Twice coughing. Once sitting up suddenly, desperate for water. And once in mindless panic, hands pressed hard and bruising against his own chest.

 _I can’t breathe,_ he’d said, not so much awake as terrified, unable to understand why it hurt, why it felt constricted, what was happening to him.

Laurent had calmed him eventually. He doesn’t know how long ago it was. Not very long at all, is his weary suspicion.

He leaves his on nightshirt and pulls on pants, lacing them only tight enough to stay up. He doesn’t bother with shoes or putting up his hair. Theomache slept in the clothes she was wearing (they’ll have to get her into that change of clothes some time) and he takes her hand to lead her out of the tent. Damen, as best he can at this point, slumbers on.

The night is warm and clear, promising a searing day. The moon has already set, and Laurent expects it’s not so far off from dawn as he’d like. He and Theomache wander to the cold embers of the night’s campfire, settling into the dirt, while Theomache talks quietly about her dream.

“—And then it chased me around the room and made these really scary sounds and then I can’t remember anything else,” she says, as they sit back against the log. It’s a bit creaky, probably some old fence post left in the nearby fields that the men dragged over, and Laurent nods sympathetically.

“That does sound scary,” he says. Theomache pulls a face.

“But it was a bush!” she says. “Bushes aren’t supposed to be scary at all! Why was I scared just because I was asleep?”

Laurent shrugs. “Dreams are strange,” he says. It's not the hour for any more profound an answer. “Sometimes they make bushes scary. I’m afraid I can’t explain it.”

Theomache scrunches her nose, making the freckles on her cheeks jump disapprovingly. “But you should, though,” she says. “You’re a grown-up! Grown-ups are supposed to know.”

Laurent can’t help it. He laughs, as quietly as he can, with neither mirth nor malice. Theomache glares.

“I’m sorry,” he says to her, stretching his legs out in the dirt. He’s smiling while he says it, an almost novel sensation. “I truly don’t know why. But when you figure it out, please let me know. I’m fascinated.”

The stars are brilliant and profligate, the breeze just strong enough to ruffle their hair, and Theomache is glaring at him. She may just have her mother’s eyes, Laurent thinks. Damen may just have been right about that.

“Don’t make fun of me,” she says, crossing her arms pointedly across her chest. “I hate it when people make fun of me.”

“I would never,” Laurent says, with sincerity, tempering his smile to something he truly hopes is kind. “If only out of self-preservation. I suspect any advantage of intelligence I may have is going to be very short-lived.”

This assertion appears slightly beyond Theomache. She wrinkles her nose again. Laurent’s smile is unwavering.

“Here,” he says, “You have something in your hair. Can I take it out?”

She nods, ducking her head so that he can pull the little tuft of something, maybe grass, maybe lint, from her curls. He flicks it away, letting the breeze carry it on over the rocky little clearing where they’ve all camped.

“You always ask before you touch me,” Theomache says. She’s looking up at him intently, hands grasping her own ankles. “Why do you do that?”

Laurent considers his answer, looking at Theomache’s resolute face. She may have her mother’s eyes, but there’s no denying she’s a scion of the House of Theomedes. It strikes Laurent suddenly, dizzily, gazing at her. How much her stubborn face looks like his husband’s.

“Have people sometimes touched you without asking?” he asks her.

She seems to think on this, eyes cast up and to the side. “Yeah,” she finally admits, as if loath to admit he might know anything about her, even as she smiles. “Sometimes.”

“That used to happen to me, too,” he says. “I didn’t like it very much. So I like to ask other people, just to be sure.”

“Oh.” She considers this. Her finger taps against her chin in an exaggerated motion, something she must have picked up from watching an adult. He doesn’t smile at her again, lest it be considered further teasing.

“...Can I touch you?” she says after a moment of deep contemplation. Her gaze is verging on rapt.

“Of course,” he replies. “You don’t need to ask when it’s me.”

“Can I…” Her grin threatens to split her cheeks. “Touch your face?”

Laurent settles himself more firmly against the log. Just in case.

“If you’d like,” he says, and his caution is rewarded when Theomache, giggling fanatically, slaps her hands to Laurent’s cheeks and beams.

“Ah,” Laurent says. His voice is slightly muffled, what with his cheeks pushed up almost to cover his eyebrows. “I see.”

“Can I touch your eyes?” Themoache says, up on her knees, bouncing and bouncing. Laurent’s cheeks bounce with her.

He doesn’t get a chance to reply. Tiny palms are already occluding his vision.

“I no longer see,” Laurent says. Theomache dutifully considers this the funniest thing ever said by man.

“Can I—” she starts again, with an eagerness in her tone that’s slightly worrying, and Laurent cuts in.

“Alright,” he says, “I shudder to think where this is going. My turn.” He pulls back from Theomache’s hands, grabbing her wrists before she can entirely escape.

“Can I…” He lets it ripen. “...tickle you?”

This is simply too much. Theomache shrieks with laughter, face alight, and Laurent rushes to try and shush her as the sound carries across the fields and copses and the neverending stretch of the road beside them. She finally claps her over her mouth, eyes huge, shoulders jumping. She is also nodding furiously.

“Are you sure?” he asks, voice conspiratorial, leaning forward to meet her eye. “I’m very good at tickling, and you’ll have to stay quiet the entire time.”

Further ecstatic nodding. Her hands are already sliding from her mouth.

“Alright,” he smiles, unable to help it, and grabs her.

She’s screaming before he can even get his hands on her ribs. When he does the screaming, very loud, very delighted, perhaps doubles in volume, and Laurent is hardly surprised at all when a soldier appears breathless and wild-eyed just seconds later.

“Your Majesty,” she says, “and, er, your Highness. I heard voices.”

Theomache has collapsed over Laurent’s lap in a hiccupy, wheezing fit. Laurent absently puts a hand over her mouth.

“I’m sorry, just a fit of high spirits,” Laurent says to the soldier, who was probably expecting far less high-pitched shrieking during her watch. “We’ll endeavor to be quieter.”

The soldier nods, already stepping away. “Er, as you say, sire,” she replies, perhaps a little eager for escape now that she’s determined no one is actively bleeding. “Goodnight, sire, ma’am.”

Laurent waves as she retreats. Theomache does, too, once he’s nudged her a little.

“Let’s move a little farther from all the nice sleeping guardsmen, shall we?” he says once they’re alone again. Theomache lets him grab her by the wrists, swinging her upright as he stands. She giggles breathlessly, gripping tight to his hand as they wander away from the remains of the fire, her eyes wide and flashing in the starlight.

The trade road they’ve been following from Marlas is another Artesian remnant, same as the road to Imbros. Most of the trade road’s paving was stripped generations ago, however, repurposed for homes and patched into town walls and stacked with surprising skill to form the low walls that divide every field and paddock that border its long length. Laurent sits with his back to one such farmer’s wall, not more than shouting distance from their camp, and feels Theomache plop down at this side.

The wall is likely older than the fort at Marlas by generations, stacked without paste or mortar, but not a pebble budges as they lean against it. Theomache’s quiet beside him, and Laurent allows himself a moment to look up at the stars.

It seems improbable that she might actually be tired again, but he can hope.

“Why do people keep calling me that?” Theomache asks, after a moment.

“Why do they keep calling you what?” The stars are like paint splattered across a dark canvas, thick with light.

“Your Highness,” she says. “And my lady, and ma’am, and—”

Bats are calling in the darkness, high noises of hunting and chasing.

Laurent experiences shock as completely and suddenly as if he’d been dropped down a well.

Theomache is still talking. “Why do people keep treating me like a, like a—”

“Like a princess,” Laurent says, able to keep his voice only so even. “They’re treating you like a princess.”

“Yeah!” she says, eager. “Why are they doing that?”

He didn’t expect this of Jokaste.

At not a single point, in not a single scenario, and he’d had so many of them.

Theomache is staring at him with hungry eyes.

“...What has your mother told you about your father?” he asks, and, when she squirms, adds, “I promise you my question is related to yours.”

Theomache looks down at her hands, gripped tight to her own crossed ankles. “...Mama won’t tell me anything about him,” she says, with all the impotent frustration of a fatherless child. “She says I have to wait until I’m older. Which isn’t fair, because I’ve met loads of kids who know their fathers! Even little ones! But she said…” her shoulders hunch, like a young bird’s. Laurent makes a soft noise of encouragement.

She wants to get the words of it right. He can see her try. “Mama said,” she starts, eyes closed tight, “‘Why can’t it stay us for just a little while longer.’ She only said it once, even when I didn’t know what she meant and I asked her and asked her, but she said it.” She opens her eyes, looks back up at Laurent, openly searching. “I heard her.”

Laurent sighs. There’s a stone at the base of the wall, digging bluntly into his spine. It had been nice, even at night, even exhausted, to talk with Theomache and tickle her and come so close to believing, if only for an hour, that she was just another lovely, whip-smart child he’d met along the road.

“I can’t speak for your mother,” he says, after a long moment. He must try and get this right. He doesn’t know if he can, but he must try. “She is a very smart woman, and I suspect, increasingly, that she might be very kind.” Theomache nods furiously. Laurent’s mouth twists in something like a smile. “But knowing about your father’s family is going to change a lot of things in your life, Theomache. It already has.”

She jolts forward, as if strung on a line. “Do you know?” she asks. Pleads. “Do you know who my dad is?”

“I don’t,” he tells her, because he has to tell her the truth. “Only your mother knows for certain. I only know who he could be. But I do know that your grandfather was King Theomedes of Akielos.”

“That was my name!” She’s almost in his lap at this point. “Before I asked Mama to give me a new one!”

“Yes,” he says, “I believe she named you after him. She knew you were of royal blood.”

Her face is slack, her mouth wide. “Royal?” she says. “Like you?”

“Yes, very much like me. And very much like King Damianos. Theomache—” he shifts to face her entirely, feeling the stones dig into his shoulder now, the length of his arm, “the men treat you like a princess because you are a princess. Your mother was a noblewoman of Aegina. Your father was either Kastor, once Prince of Akielos, or my husband Damianos, who is now King of Akielos. I told you on our ride yesterday that we wanted to find you and your mother so that we could keep you both safe, and that’s true. But we also came to find you because you are our heir. You are Princess Theomache of Akielos and Vere. We would like to bring you home with us and make you part of our family.”

He thinks he didn’t realize what it meant, until he said it out loud.

This is his heir. She is his husband’s blood. This is his family.

She has so many questions, he can see it in her face. She’s never been taught to hide herself.

He wonders which will find voice first, and then she snaps her eyes to his and says, “What about Mama?”

Dawn is coming, faintly, as if slinking home from a long night in town. It’s the second he’s seen in two days.

“We would like your mother to come with us, too,” he replies. The ache of exhaustion behind his eyes is as familiar now as the rhythm of his pulse.

“What if she doesn’t want to come?”

Then Laurent will tie her hands, toss her in the back of the wagon, and gallop the horses all the way home. As he should have done years ago.

“Then I will talk to her and try to convince her,” he says to Theomache. When her mouth opens around another question, he sighs.

“Theomache, I know this a lot to take in. Most princes and princesses know from the day they’re born who they are, but you have to learn it all at once from someone you’ve only just met. It’s fine to take some time to think about this. We can talk about it more at any time.”

He feels a little guilty for shutting her down, but he can feel his own control slowly unravelling as the sky grows, by fractions, lighter and lighter. She seems to accept it without offense, anyways. When he settles back against the wall, legs crossed in the trampled-down grass, she hurries to match him. Her shoulder settles against his arm.

“Can I talk about it with King Damianos?” Her voice is quiet.

Laurent closes his eyes. The stone in his spine has been joined by another, punching just under his shoulder blade.

“You said he’s maybe my father,” she says. “You said.”

“I did,” he replies. He owes her this. “You’re right. And I would very much like you two to get to know another each other and talk about all sorts of things. But Damianos is— very sick right now.” He manages it with barely a hitch. “I hope you won’t be upset if he’s too tired to talk.”

Too tired, too unforgiving, too unable to see the child as anything but the product of her mother. They’re similar concepts.

Even in the heat, Theomache is warm against him, such an undeniably living thing leaning against his side. She nods silently, her head digging into Laurent’s arm. Laurent takes the hint and pulls his arm free to drape across her shoulders. She curls against him.

The bats pour like a river above them, piping and whistling, coursing home as pale gray light begins to sweep the sky. A few songbirds begin, sleepily, to sound from the trees.

Theomache’s next question is equally sleepy, her weight heavy against Laurent. “If King Damianos is maybe my father,” she says, almost a mumble, “and you’re married to King Damianos, does that make you maybe my father, too?”

The strength of feeling that grips him is almost alarming, like the first crack of a winter lake he could have sworn was frozen through.

“Damianos and I would like to formally adopt you as our heir in the traditions of our countries,” he says, forcing the words from his rocky throat as the stars dim and fade above. “But you and I share no blood.” His hand rubs a soft circle over one of her skinny shoulders. “I think it’s up to you if you’d like me to be your father.”

She’s quiet for so long he thinks she may finally have fallen back asleep. When she does speak, he has to bend down to hear her.

“Maybe,” she says. “I— can I think about it?”

Her eyes are closed. There’s no one to see his face but the birds and the bats and the morning star. “Of course,” he says. “There’s no hurry.”

“Okay,” she mumbles, then, “Thank you.”

Laurent nods. He doesn’t speak. His palm keeps moving in a gentle friction across her back, and soon enough she’s asleep.

He sits for a while, feeling each of her warm exhales through the thin fabric of his nightshirt. His hand doesn’t stop, even as his arm begins to feel the ache of it.

He watches the sky and sees in his mind, like scenes from a play that has neither beginning nor end, only further repetitions, Felix’s muffled sobs as he’d mounted his horse and turned for Marlas, and Damen’s cold eyes as he’d look at Theomache, and Theomache laughing and laughing as she’d toppled back with Laurent’s hands at her ribs, and the broken skin of Damen’s palms resting in his, and Jokaste, her steady blue regard, the expression in her eyes he would not do her the disservice of naming, watching him beside an open wagon on a starry night at the end of the long, sweltering road to the Kingsmeet.

Theomache shifts slowly at his side. Laurent closes his eyes. The heat of the world rises.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for all the comments, I love them all even though I'm not good enough a person to reply to them!!!


	5. Chapter 5

The day is still and gray and punishingly hot as they begin the long climb down to the Patran border.

Sweat rolls down Laurent’s ribs in quick, slithering lines, hunting for some scrap of his clothing not yet soaked through. His hands slide on the reins, the damp brush of his hair at the back of his neck is loathsome. Tiffy maintains her careful amble down the half-gravel path of the trade road.

Laurent’s exhausted, but so is everyone else. They can’t travel quickly and so they ride long, waking early and making camp only when the moon is high in the sky. The soldiers spend hours walking beside their horses, giving the sweat-dark beasts what rest they can. They have a few extra, at least. With so many men having been turned away.

They're half as many now as left Marlas. Laurent feels the absence of every soldier and servant sent back to the capital like a patch of skin peeled from his back. Their nightly camps have become disorganized, each man taking on the work of two missing fellows, and their supplies dwindle. Whatever fight awaits them in Volsget's mansion, Laurent is increasingly certain they will lose it. As Damen said.

Theomache is riding with him again, having been unable to keep their pace, however slow it may currently be, atop her own pony. She's less than pleased with it. Her wellspring of fascination with the ride, the troop, the two kings about whom her mother told her so many stories has long been exhausted. Now she is five years old and far from her mother and trapped upon a saddle that makes her ache every morning and evening. Her complaints are understandable, but Laurent has no answers for her. Her last bout petered out perhaps an hour ago, in the face of Laurent's silence, and he stays silent now as her head droops in a welcome doze.

The coughing has started up again, a length back and to his right. Laurent doesn't turn his head. There are no answers to that, either.

Just ahead of Laurent and his charge, Lazar and Alienor talk quietly, their heads turning occasionally to the northern hills. There's a haze hanging across the sky, and the smell of woodsmoke sneaks in with every breath. The fire began sometime in the night, making for a bloody dawn, and Lazar has watched the hills all morning in case the wind should spring up and carry the flames north. Alienor follows his arm when he points southeast, to the kyroi's seat, then south, to where the soldiers and farmers and shepherds and townspeople will be digging firebreaks with every tool they can find. She's got her reins tucked around two fingers of her off hand, gesturing to Lazar and the grassy hills as they speak. Laurent watches them, with the cicadas droning from the cypresses.

In the early morning of the day after they brought Theomache back to camp, when the sun had risen to find her still tucked beneath Laurent's arm, sleeping against a farmer's wall, Laurent had seen Alienor. Seated just beyond the last tent in their camp, bent over her own lap, writing quickly. Her arm had seemed steady, despite the previous night's arrow to the shoulder. Paschal did his work well.

She'd stayed focused as Laurent gathered Theomache up in his arms, stepped quietly over the scrubby grass, and said, "Reporting our grand successes to the Lady Martine?"

Alienor didn't jump. Many did, when Laurent didn’t bother to make noise, but she simply twisted then stood, dropping her letter to the grass, as she bowed to her king.

"Good morning, your Majesty,” she said as she rose, hands clasped tight behind her back. Her bow was of the exact right angle as well, appropriate to a subject of some standing greeting her sovereign in an informal setting. She hadn’t been trained in court manners by Martine, it would seem—she performed the little ritual like she’d been born to it. “I’m keeping her informed as best I can.”

Laurent nodded, Theomache’s snores buzzing in his ear. “How regularly are you sending them back?”

“About every three days, sire. As the road allows.”

Laurent raised a polite eyebrow. “I can’t imagine I’ve seen that many of our messengers come galloping past. Are you meeting them in nearby sheep pens?”

“Not as such, sire,” Alienor said. “They’ve been riding without insignia, per the Lady’s orders. As she ordered along the border during the trouble with Kempt last year, I believe.” She didn’t speak carefully, as one might when reminding one’s king of something he should know. Her tone was simply even. “It may be why you missed them.”

Laurent smiled slightly, hiking Theomache higher on his hip. Exhaustion swum like little silver fish across his sight. “That would make sense, yes. You, oh—”

Theomache jolted suddenly, as Laurent held her, not fully waking but coming close to it, her face just beginning to contort, a cry on her lips. She was heavy, and Laurent slow, and he had to drop her sandals, carried back from the field, to steady her against his chest. She quieted as he rocked from foot to foot. He trawled through memories of his mother, his brother, for comforting things to say to her. When he looked up, Alienor was holding Theo’s sandals.

“I,” she began to say, the first hesitation Laurent had seen in her. “...Would you like me to walk with you back to your tent, sire? I can carry her for a while.”

Laurent’s mind worked as quickly as it could manage.

She could be the poisoner, of course. She could have gotten into the supplies (anyone could have gotten into the supplies), she could have treated Damen’s tack when Felix wasn’t looking ( _Felix_ could have treated the tack when no one else was looking). She was a spy, and battle-trained, she could have simply snuck past their guard and slit Damen’s throat in the night if she wanted him dead so badly (they were surrounded by soldiers, all of them armed— who couldn’t?). Letting her hold Theomache, even for the two minutes it would take to reach their tent, could be foolish beyond all reason.

Alienor was watching him, two very small sandals hooked over her fingers. She held them a little way from her body, like she wasn’t sure of their provenance. The rising light caught the hint of a scar down her neck.

Damen was speaking to him in the tent again, his eyes dim, his voice pleading. He could hear it.

He didn’t know her. He didn’t really know any of them. She’d been at the top of Martine’s list.

“Thank you,” said Laurent, passing Theomache into Alienor’s arms, “she’s heavier than she looks.”

Alienor accepted her carefully, quiet and frowning as she arranged each skinny limb into something comfortable for them both. Laurent, taking the sandals from her grip, watched with amusement.

“Is it because she’s a bastard?” he asked, as Alienor walked them straight-backed through the camp, seemingly doing her best to ignore the five-year-old drooling slightly on her shoulder. “Or are you this uncomfortable with all children?”

The sun had barely crested the earth, and already the air seemed to crackle with heat. Laurent could nearly feel his skin beginning to pink as Alienor, after a moment of consideration, said, “I have no problem with children, sire.”

“No,” Laurent replied, turning his eyes back to the rough path between the tents. The flash of humor had faded. “Of course.”

Laurent had spent the past five years attempting to disabuse his countrymen of their ridiculous prejudices against bastards. The common people had never much bought into it in the first place. The gentry were proving more troublesome.

Theomache would bring it to a head. Laurent would perform all the necessary rites, satisfy all the necessary lords, and it could still so easily dissolve into civil war. His only heir was an Akielon-born bastard— the sheer stupidity of what he and Damen were attempting was too massive to even be considered. He had so many more immediate problems.

If he could persuade Alienor, though.

She was high-born, obviously, from a traditionalist family. One in disgrace, or else he’d know her from Arles, perhaps out of favor since even his father’s time. No great bellwether of wider success with the court, then, but a necessary first step. If not her, now, then perhaps no one.

He watched her from the corner of his eye and she submitted to his watching, her eyes straight ahead, her grip on Theomache no tighter than absolutely necessary. Not much to work with, but— perhaps.

It was odd, how familiar Alienor felt to him. Cold, court-trained, eminently pragmatic. She was like some set piece from his childhood— one of the proud, implicitly powerful faces that lined his memories of Arles, even as he’d moved through the court as an adult and discovered every imperious mask had hid a mind as fallible, scrabbling, animal as the next.

Even the suspicion he was unable to dismiss, that shortened each muscle to an agonizing tension as he watched Alienor pull a hank of Theomache’s hair from her own mouth with a look of distaste, even that was part of it. The feeling of home.

Of an old home, of course.

His life was in Marlas now, with Damen. That was home.

The guilt had still been gnawing at him, faintly, like it was testing his meat, when they’d arrived at Laurent’s tent and Alienor had returned Theomache to his arms.

 

* * *

 

They make camp late in the evening, with the stars occluded by smoke. The remains of their men pitch the tents quickly, eager to get to their own bedrolls, as Laurent and Paschal help Damen from his horse. Ridiculous, that Damen still insists on riding when there’s space for him in the wagon, but Laurent refrains from comment. Damen’s arm is hot as a kiln across his shoulders.

Later, Theomache jabs her finger at the chicken-scratch map of the continent spread over the tent’s small table and says, “Which one’s that?” She’s pointing somewhere north of Delfeur.

Laurent drew the poor approximation of his own lands to keep her occupied as the moon rose and he and Damen debated the messengers’ latest gift, their only report so far from Marlas, but he was a fool to think there wouldn’t be questions.

“We could send someone, Lazar, back to Acquitart,” Damen is saying, his deep voice hoarse and frustrated after a day spent attempting to cough up an illness that won’t shake loose. “I know Martine keeps messenger birds in all the forts. If we just got her and Nikandros a sketch of that soldier’s sword—”

“We did, Damen,” Laurent replies, “yesterday. Not Lazar, but that guardswoman with the odd eyes— she caught up with us this morning.”

“You didn’t—”

“I _did._ I told you when we set out. I’m sorry you don’t remember.”

“Which one is _that?”_ Theomache cuts in, insistent, and tugs hard at Laurent’s sleeve.

Laurent turns to her. Her finger has drifted slightly east. “Chasteigne,” he says, then checks himself. That river changed course last spring, took half the province’s soil with it. “Or Lys. It depends on the season.”

When he looks back up, Damen is glaring at Martine’s letter. Glaring, not reading— his eyes aren’t moving. Laurent, with careful motions, settles back into his chair.

He hadn’t been dosed by their poisoner again, was what Paschal said. Damen’s breathing is poor, but the coughing has gotten no worse. The poison isn’t causing the confusion, the forgetfulness, the events of last night. No, it’s now the fever that’s going to kill him.

The unbearable dog-days heat isn’t making anything better. It persists well into the night, and they’re too far from the coast for any sea winds. It means Damen can’t cool down. It meant he hadn’t recognized Laurent.

Or, no, that was imprecise. He _had_ recognized Laurent. He’d simply recognized him as the person he was, the night they met— drunk, vile, and staring down at Damen with all the respect he’d afford a smeared trail of shit. Only a few weeks away from flaying the skin from his back. That was what he’d seen.

It didn't last long, fortunately. The delusion broke after a few minutes, just enough time to wake half the camp with the noise and scare Theo witless. Damen had came back to himself, apologized, begged Laurent’s forgiveness, and fallen asleep as he begged.

Laurent had given it to him, of course, and then sat awake until the sun rose, willing his rabbiting heart to slow.

The night had punctured something, some last soap-bubble illusion held on fingertips between them. Damen has been quiet and off-kilter all day, and he barely meets Laurent’s eye now.

“Why has Genevote even come back to Marlas?” Damen says, apparently back to reading the page in his hand instead of merely scowling at it. “Nikandros isn’t going to give her her mines back. She might as well petition a boulder wrapped in a chiton.”

“Perhaps, but at least he’s not me,” Laurent replies, as Theomache bounces beside the table again, demanding his attention.

“And over here? The big houses?”

“Those are the Vaskian mountains. I may not have drawn them quite to scale.”

“One of us should have stayed,” Damen says, “to manage the court. Nikandros has been in Ios for too long—”

Laurent doesn’t dignify this with a response. “What about this place?” Theomache is asking, with her big eyes on him. His small smile isn’t entirely forced, despite his distraction. He remembers playing a very similar game to this with Auguste.

“Aegina,” Laurent tells her, “where your mother is from.”

 _“Oh!”_ Theo says, erupting with curiosity. “Can we go? Is it close? Does everyone look like Mama? Do they have mountains, too? Are there bugs?”

Laurent blinks. “Bugs?”

“I like bugs,” Theo explains, when she pauses for breath, and then launches back into her questions. It’s obvious Jokaste has been sparing with tales of her past— Theomache is starved for them, and she quizzes Laurent for several breathless minutes before an overenthusiastic gesture ends with her swiping the inkwell across the table.

Laurent stands quickly, rescuing their poor excuse for a map from the flood as Theo claps her hands to her mouth, but Damen isn’t as fast. Ink sloshes over Martine’s letter and onto his lap, and he jumps haphazardly to his feet with a bitten off curse, black trickling down his pants.

Theomache screams softly, with her hands clapped over her mouth, a child’s overreaction to a mistake. Laurent pushes her gently back from the tabletop and its swimming puddle of ink. “It’s alright,” he says, his back and legs stretching sorely after mere minutes seated. “Let’s go ask the guard to fetch us a rag, and then we can—”

_“Laurent.”_

Damen’s voice is featureless, smothering, the weight of the sea when it’s already far above your head.

“Why is she here?” he says.

He is standing with his arms away from his sides, black dripping from his fingers, his beautiful, haggard face absolutely expressionless as his eyes bore into Laurent’s. Theo clings to Laurent’s pant leg. Everything smells of burnt brush and sweat.

Laurent understands, with a sudden clarity, what’s about to happen. That tremor to Damen’s hands, it’s not just the fever— it’s the fury, too. Twisted like old rope into his every limb. Damen is angry, has been angry for hours, and now they’re going to fight.

“Theo, go outside and ask the guard to take you to Paschal’s tent,” Laurent says.

“I don’t—”

He detaches her from his clothing, sends her toward the tent flap with a hand between her shoulders. “Go now, please.”

Laurent has a very good idea of where this will end, even if Damen may still be unaware, and the thought of it is threatening to break his control. Despite how much it is owed. How much it is overdue. He seems to lack the courage for it. So, when the canvas closes behind Theomache, Laurent goes first.

“She’s here because she is your _daughter,_ Damen,” he says, stepping forward into the dead-aired distance between them, “as much as you can’t seem to stand the mere sight of her.”

Damen is flushed and unfocused, nearly the worst Laurent’s ever seen him. Laurent’s opening feint is shamefully effective.

“She is _not_ my daughter,” Damen snaps.

“And even if we could know that, in what realm of your imagining would it _matter?”_ Laurent shoots back, immediate, because this may be a poor diversion but that doesn’t mean Laurent isn't mad, too. “We intend to adopt her as our heir. Did you forget? She’s your blood either way, a bastard either way— oh, you defend her honor now?” Laurent adds bitterly, when Damen opens his mouth. “After how many days spent treating her like some garden weed to be ignored until it withers away?”

“I have not—” Damen says, though his face pulls into an ugly grimace as he speaks it, because, of course, he has.

“It is _not_ her fault that this is happening to you,” Laurent says, “and if you think she won’t notice that you shudder every time she asks some entirely expected question about you, or the world, or her mother—”

Laurent isn’t at his best, either. Damen’s expression darkens dramatically.

“Speaking of who is at fault,” he says, low.

Damen’s breathing is shallow and hitching, his color furious enough, fevered enough, to show in the dim lantern-light. Laurent’s faintly amazed he’s still standing. This isn’t how they normally argue. They haven’t argued at all in years. Not truly, not with red faces and raised voices and the need, growing strongly in Laurent, to throw something. If only for the shock of it.

Well, in for a copper.

“Don’t be absurd. Jokaste hasn’t poisoned you.”

“No,” Damen snarls, really snarls, lurching forward with one hand against the tentpole. Laurent experiences the immediate, instinctual need to step back, and strangles it ruthlessly. “She has merely contrived to finish what she started five years ago.”

Laurent almost laughs. “If she wanted you dead, she’d have buried you with your father.”

Damen stares at him in something like horror.

“How can you _defend_ her?” he says, demanding it. “She sold me into slavery, she destroyed my family, how can you possibly trust _her_ of all people when you’ve turned off a dozen of our best men, who have served us faithfully, who served my mother and father faithfully, none of whom have—”

The rest is lost. Damen pitches forward coughing, nearly doubling over with it, and Laurent keeps himself frozen, until, suddenly, he isn’t, catching Damen around the chest and hauling him up. Careful of Damen’s bruised shoulder, his shredded hands, every agonized muscle strapped across his ribs. Damen’s heart pounding painfully against Laurent’s chest. Laurent tightens his grip, meaning to walk them backwards until he can get Damen onto the bed, but then Damen’s hands are on him, pushing him away.

“Enough,” Damen rasps, heaving for breath. His hands are on Laurent’s shoulders and then they fall away, leaving Damen standing alone. He’s never pushed Laurent away before. Laurent can’t remember a single time. “Laurent, enough. You know I’m not a match for you right now. Just answer the question.”

Laurent stares at him. Some lumbering part of him is still stuck on the sensation of Damen’s hands dropping from his chest, their fading, feverish warmth, and can’t immediately reply. He could be cruel, an easy default, but that would be wrong, too.

“I saw the reports from Martine before we left,” Damen says, is saying. “I finally did my reading.” It’s humorless, without even some grim little smile. “I know you’ve been tracking her for years, since before even your ascension. Her and the child, you’ve known where they are. Why didn’t you do something about them before now?”

It’s so distinctly unfair, is the thing. They both know it. This issue, of such magnitude, should never have been left to Laurent’s judgement alone. But Damen asks the question, because with both of their tacit agreements, it was. For all these years. Damen may never have asked, but Laurent never brought it up. Fairness is not relevant.

He can’t avoid this any more. He _can’t._ He _will not._

“Damen,” he says, “I don’t know if you never realized this or were simply too kind to ever confront it, but from the moment Jokaste told us she’d sent her child to my uncle, I was planning to die.”

Damen, leaning heavily against the tentpole, seems thrown by this sudden change in topic. Laurent isn’t. It isn’t sudden at all. It’s been festering in him for years.

His back is straight, his voice clear: “That night in Mellos, I got down on my knees because I wanted you to remember me as a giving lover. I set Jokaste free on the road to the Kingsmeet because she was like me and I wanted at least one of us to live. And I have let her run free for the past five years because I have not been able to face the miserable cowardice with which I committed myself to my own death.”

“...Cowardice?” Damen asks, his brow creasing.

 _“Yes._ For months you had helped me best my uncle’s every ploy,” Laurent says, “with your help I had taken Ravenel and Fortaine, I had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, but I was so… _enchanted_ ,” he spits it, a sick laugh, “by the dream of an honorable death presented to me that I did not even consider the idea that you could help me find a way around it. I would die and you would live and it would be done.”

He inhales, deeply, like he’s standing in a room which he needs to command. Like he’s more than he is.

“I was stupid and blind,” he says to Damen. “I was ready to give up on a chance at this, our life together, everything you and I have accomplished over the past five years, for nothing. For my uncle’s lies.” His throat is tight, his breath threatening to escape his control. Damen is staring at him. “I let Jokaste run roughshod across the continent all these years because she reminds me that I was a coward then and I remain a coward now. And because of that she has been caught up in this plot, and her child has been put in danger, and you have been made a casualty. It’s not her fault that you’re dying, it’s mine. All of it.”

Damen’s eyes are fixed to Laurent’s, his face slack and unreadable. Laurent needs a reaction from him, needs it desperately, like he needs breath or light. He doesn’t move a muscle, barely blinks. Waits.

Damen’s mouth opens, then closes. Damen swallows. He doesn’t say no.

Laurent’s eyes slam shut.

He knew this. He knew this, he knew this, he knew this.

“You take the bed,” Laurent says, opening his eyes and turning away, already mastering it, already folding it all down into some small, facetless thing that won’t bother him ever again. “I’ll find the girl, and somewhere to sleep.”

Maybe Damen says his name as Laurent leaves the tent. Who knows. He finds Theomache, and speaks politely with Paschal, and by the time he returns Damen is already asleep, slumped in his clothes atop the covers. Laurent settles the girl, then sits down. He props his feet on their little table, still stained with ink. He closes his eyes and he finds he doesn’t feel a thing.

 

* * *

 

Jokaste’s third note finds them in the morning, in the hands of a slightly wild-eyed messenger. Mud is splattered across his embroidered fleur-de-lis, sweat sheens his horse. Alienor gets him water as Laurent unfolds the little scrap of paper.

_The nursemaid’s in Veirsa. I know you don’t owe me anything._

They’re due to cross into Patras this morning. Veirsa’s just across the border, a small town Laurent knows only for its oil depot. They’re maybe two days out from their goal.

“Would you like me to go fetch her, you Majesty?” Alienor says, to his left.

“No,” he replies, refolding the note carefully. Today is as hot as yesterday, as hot as tomorrow will surely be. It’s beginning to lose its distinctiveness. “Stay with the troop, keep them riding. We can’t lose any more time. I’ll take one of the soldiers and return in the evening.”

“Yes, sire. And his Exalted Majesty?”

“Let him sleep. I’ll be back tonight,” he says, and goes to saddle his horse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy first anniversary to my unexpected hiatus! sorry about that, guys. more coming soon, thanks for sticking with it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for emetophobia and mentions of past child abuse

Ilsebe is nineteen, Kemptian, and scared out of her mind.

Laurent finds her under a table in a scullery in an inn just inside of Veirsa, where she has avoided two searches by Volsget’s men over the past three days, and from which she refuses to extricate herself until Laurent swears, in his middling Kemptian, that he came on behalf of the Lady Jokaste. Then she stands, clings to his guard’s arm, and does not let go until they reach the horses. Presumably at some point she realizes she rides with royalty. At no point does that reaction surface from beneath her general panic.

Alienor did not succeed in keeping quite the pace Laurent desired during the day— the three of them, Laurent and the nurse and the guard, are forced to ride back towards Akielos for at least a half-hour once they reach the trade road, squinting into the fire-red coin of the sun. The smoke is thinner in the evening but not yet gone, and Ilsebe rides with her thin ruddy hair pulled high off her neck.

It’s beautiful, in some molten, late summer way. Laurent catches himself watching the hills and scrabbling forest edges scroll past for long stretches of time, unable to choose any point of the landscape on which to fix his eyes. He gives Tiffy her head and she moves like a water wheel beneath him— a huge, unbroken motion.

It’s all lost when they see the camp, and Theomache, and Ilsebe screams like she’s been gutted.

“Theomache! _Theomache!”_

Theomache’s skinny figure jolts up, her hand slipping from Pallas’ even as he shoves himself between her and Ilsebe’s horse, the poor beast skidding across the dust as Ilsebe swings down from its back. By the time Laurent gets his feet on the ground the girl and her nurse are wrapped entirely together, Theomache nearly swallowed by the huge dusty sleeves of Ilsebe’s undergown as Ilsebe presses her face hard to her charge’s curly head.

“Oh, darling,” she’s saying, her Veretian choppy but clear, “oh, little bird, I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“I rode with traders!” Theomache says. “In big wagons! And, Ils’be— look, they’re _kings!”_

The older girl laughs, breathless and red-faced. Laurent turns from them as Tiffy is led away and the camp begins to return to its evening business. The intensity of Ilsebe’s relief is something he can watch only from the corner of his eye, like it might burn spots in his sight if he looked too hard at her clutching hands and tear-stained cheeks.

“And Mama?” Theomache says. Her voice is eager, so certain she will not be denied. “Is Mama with you?”

Ilsebe lets her down gently. Laurent looks up. Damen is standing at the entrance to his and Laurent’s small tent, Paschal steadying his bruised side. He’s watching, his expression unreadable, as Theomache begins to sob, her entire body shaking and heaving. Laurent goes and finds something to do.

 

* * *

 

“Theo and the young woman are having some dinner in your tent, your Majesty,” Paschal says to him some time later, as Laurent watches the road from the edge of the camp. “Would you like to join them?”

They don’t have enough supplies left for him to inventory them more than twice. And Lazar has already taken care of his tack. “Of course,” he says.

“King Damianos is dining with them, as well.” As if Laurent needs some kind of warning.

“I’m glad to hear he has an appetite,” Laurent says, and turns.

The tent goes from close to cramped as soon as Laurent and Paschal enter, and the mood is decidedly awkward. Laurent suspects that Paschal, for perhaps the first time in his life, was carrying the conversation before he went to fetch his king. Theo sits in Ilsebe’s lap, far too large for comfort, as Ilsebe stares at her plate with an embarrassed flush creeping up her pale neck and Damen works steadily through a heel of bread. His eyes, filmed with exhaustion, flick up when Laurent enters, then back down. His thin shirt is dark across the back and under the arms. Laurent wonders if it’s the heat or the fever.

Ilsebe is looking at him and Paschal with such particular hope, as Damen continues chewing. She doesn’t know how to hide it.

It isn’t much trouble to do this. It shouldn’t be.

“Don’t stop on my account,” Laurent says after a moment, plucking a pear from the too-large platter that takes up much of the tabletop. Ink-stain still covers a third of the wood. Then he folds himself into a chair, takes an exaggerated bite, swallows, and launches into Kemptian. Ilsebe’s expression brightens instantly.

He keeps his questions simple, in part because his Kemptian is far from fluent, in part so that Theo may follow along. Ilsebe has obviously taught her a fair amount of the language, and the interrupting demands for one word or another to be translated into Akielon or Veretian are admirably infrequent.

Damen, whose Kemptian is just as good as Laurent’s, watches the exchange without comment.

Ilsebe tells them in her lilting voice that she is from Saarburg, near the Veretian border, and that she served in the manor house there, like her mother before her, and she was betrothed to the pig-faced son of a cooper before Jokaste arrived in town.

“And came to stay in your master’s house?” Laurent says, over Theo’s second inquiry into what, exactly, ‘pig-faced’ translates to.

“Yes, sire. I think she may have been blackmailing him,” Ilsebe replies, with a total lack of concern. “We certainly left in a bit of rush.”

“She let you go with her?”

“She met the cooper’s boy once.” An indifferent shoulder rises then drops. “She didn’t like him very much either, sire. He was the kind who’d go quite far out of his way to kick a cat, you know? And her other nurse had stayed behind in the capital, so she was in need of help with this little monster.”

At this Theo squawks, twisting sharply in Ilsebe’s lap as the girl laughs, the rest of her explanation lost. Laurent fixes the appropriate breadth of smile to his face and takes another bite of his pear.

Theo doesn’t leave Ilsebe’s lap and never lets go of Ilsebe’s sleeve and it’s because she is desperate for her mother to return to her. But she is also laughing, and bright, and, much like Ilsebe in the afternoon, so shining with happiness it is difficult to look upon her without pain. Laurent can attempt to find satisfaction in that, at least.

He hasn’t spoken to Damen since last night. Damen hasn’t spoken to him. He wonders what they’ll do when they get back to Marlas, if they get back to Marlas. It’s like a thought experiment: you lived when you didn’t mean to, and have killed the man you pledged to. But you plan for every contingency. So if by some faint and fading chance he lives, what becomes of you?

There’s a clatter, and the hand holding the pear is suddenly absent the pear. Laurent blinks, suddenly within himself again, and finds that Theo has thrown herself across the folding table, bare feet on Ilsebe’s lap, to snatch the bitten half of a fruit from his fingers. She doesn’t even draw back once she’s got it— just clutches it like a trophy and giggles like water from a spout and blinks those big blue eyes at Laurent.

Now it is Ilsebe’s turn to squawk. She bundles Theo back onto her lap in a flurry of cotton sleeves, scolding her sharply as Paschal jolts forward to stabilize the table. Theo doesn’t seem to notice the fuss. She’s still got the pear, and beams at Laurent. The smile that unfolds from Laurent’s mouth in return feels entirely alien, but occurs nevertheless.

There’s movement to his side and he realizes, without turning, that Damen is looking at him.

“Oh, _Theo,”_ Ilsebe says, despairing, voice drawing Laurent back after too long a moment. “You don’t have to _hold it.”_

“I’m not!” Theo protests, squirming in a way that cannot entirely be blamed on her boundless thirst for attention.

“Is there somewhere she and I can—” Ilsebe starts, and then hesitates, her eyes catching Laurent’s.

Damen says, “Paschal can take her. Stay. I’m sure you’re tired.”

There is, briefly, shock, at hearing Damen’s hoarse voice outside the ringing chamber of his own mind, but Laurent doesn’t turn to stare. Paschal, whose own surprise was little more than a blink and a pause, says, “Yes, your Majesty,” and encourages a reluctant Theo out of the tent.

“But I don’t need to go!” Theo can be heard to cry, as the flap closes behind her and Paschal.

“Of course, your Highness,” Paschal replies, growing quiet, “but perhaps we can just try.”

Ilsebe doesn’t refocus until Theo’s piping complaints have faded from hearing. Her hands, absent purpose, knit themselves tightly in her lap.

“Thank you, your Majesty,” she says to Damen, casting her eyes down to the tabletop as she says it. “She’s— more upset than she looks, I think. I don’t know that she’s ever been separated from her Ladyship this long before.”

Damen apparently has no more to contribute. His fingers work quietly, tearing crumbs from his bread piece. Laurent replies smoothly, into a mere second’s-length of silence, “Of course. Thank you. Tell us the rest now, if you don’t mind.”

There is not as much as Laurent would like. Ilsebe speaks no Patran, and she and Theo were separated from Jokaste almost as soon as they arrived at Volsget’s mansion, kept far apart in the house. Ilsebe has not actually seen her since.

“How did she arrange for you and the child to escape, then?”

“I’m really not sure,” she says, apologetic. “The maids passed me notes, and some of the guards. Volsget ordered her gagged as soon as he could— they were, they were rough with her, so I know he didn’t want her talking to anyone, but she did. She arranged everything.” There’s pride in Ilsebe’s voice, sharp as a needle. “I had a bit more freedom than her, Theo and I could walk around the house some, and one night she sent me a note to take Theo to the kitchen door at first bell, and all the guards were looking the other way, except for the one that took Theo out to the trade wagon that was waiting on the road, and she got her out.”

“And you?”

“That was… harder,” Ilsebe says. One hand detaches from the other, rubs up and down her shoulder. “Volsget hurt her after Theo escaped. I don’t think he was supposed to kill her, but that didn’t stop him from hurting her. I heard her screaming, the next night. From all the way down the hall. And fewer maids talked to me after that, but there was one who still did. She looked a bit like my grandmother. And she helped hide me in the pantry for a day and a night until all the guards had been sent to look for me in town, and then she told me how to get to Veirsa and who would help me there, if I gave her Ladyship’s name, and I left that night.”

“Why wasn’t Volsget supposed to kill her?” Damen asks. Laurent still looks at Ilsebe, at the pinched line of her mouth, but can feel Damen’s presence at his right like the poorly-smothered embers of a brushfire.

Ilsebe’s head tilts, face twisting in an attempt at remembrance. Lantern-light glows steadily across her features. “There was a man who’d come to house sometimes, who spoke Patran with a very heavy accent. His hair was long, like many of the Veretian rich men wear it these days. And Theo and I were on the stairs once when he spoke with Volsget. It sounded like an argument, and like Volsget lost.”

“No chance you recognized this man, of course,” Laurent says.

“He was a little taller than you, sire, with dark hair. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Laurent says, crossing one leg tight over the other. “Anything else? Who you three were running from in Kempt?”

“Well, the Lord Mayor, most likely because of the blackmail,” Ilsebe replies, still extremely unbothered by said blackmail, “but I don’t know what her Ladyship got up to in the capital. I heard some talk, while we were passing through Vere, about a spy in Königinheim who was captured by the royal guard and hung from the city walls. I don’t know if she was involved in that.”

Incredibly likely. Laurent doesn’t say it aloud. “She was—” Ilsebe says, “I know she—”

She hesitates, glancing at Damen. He looks back, expressionless and gray-faced. Her fear is a sharp taste in the mouth but she does not look away when she says, “You’re Theomache’s father, aren’t you? Your Majesty.”

“He may be,” Laurent says, before Damen can speak. His jaw was moving slowly, like he might. “What has Jokaste told you of that?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Ilsebe says quickly. “It’s only that you—” Her eyes dart back to Damen. Measuring a resemblance, perhaps.

She returns to Laurent. “I know that her Ladyship is not always kind. I know that she—” Ilsebe’s throat works heavily as she swallows. “Volsget will hurt her again, for helping me escape. He is not kind, either. Or patient. I don’t want her to die.”

“She won’t,” Laurent says, and he does not expect Damen to reply to this but he does not expect him to nod, either, slow and measured, with his dark eyes on the girl.

 

* * *

 

They push the next day as hard as they can, with the forests of Patras beginning to rise around them. When they finally make camp, for the last time, the bay and their prize is only a few hours’ ride distant. The air is cooler, if not at all cool, the wind brisk, the sun’s red halo just vanishing from the line of the horizon.

“When we planned this little excursion,” Laurent says, as the men unload the last of the supplies between the branching pines, “there certainly wasn’t a princess involved. Or her teenage nurse.”

“You’ll need to leave men behind to watch over them,” Paschal says beside him, a worried eye on his trunk of tools and poultices.

“And I don’t have many of those left at all.”

Paschal nods, considering. The fading evening light, the brighter burn of the campfire, draw out the lines of his face. It makes him look, if not old, then certainly very tired.

“I’m going to look over King Damianos again, once the tent is up,” Paschal says, not particularly loud. The tent he’s referring to is Damen and Laurent’s. All the rest were left behind after Imbros. “Would you like to be there, or would you like me to inform you of any changes afterwards?”

The utter kindness of it pinches at him, like ant-bites. _Someday we’ll stop doing this in front of you,_ says his own voice, several ages ago, in a warm and empty room in Marlas.

“I’ll join you,” Laurent says.

 

* * *

 

“Inhale,” Paschal says, and Damen does, slowly, with Paschal’s ear to his back and scar tissue stretching like netting across his shoulders.

“Exhale.”

Laurent thinks idly about burning this tent and all its furnishings, once their journey has reached its conclusion. The little table, the sooty lanterns, the two chairs, the trunk, the carpets, the bed in which he has not slept these two nights past. Let it all go up in smoke, perhaps. Let it become a dark cloud, and then be gone.

He sits in one of the silly little chairs, watching the liquid ripple of the tent canvas in the struggling wind as Paschal does his work with Damen on the bed. A pulse taken, a temperature checked. Quiet questions asked.

“And the coughing, Exalted?”

“Less than it was,” Damen says. His voice is still some broken, hastily reassembled thing, and yet somehow an improvement on what it was yesterday. “Though that may just be because we’re out from under the smoke.”

“True,” Paschal replies, “the fire did you no favors.”

Of course smoke would make the coughing worse. Maybe Laurent can bury the tent. Or throw it into the sea.

Paschal checks the scabs on Damen’s hands and the rotation of his bruised shoulder. He presses his fingers into the muscle— making Damen hiss— and Laurent folds his hands tightly in his lap.

“Well,” Paschal says after some further amount of time, “you seem to be improving, Exalted.”

Laurent inhales once, noisily, and then his control is back. He keeps his eyes on the tent canvas, his shaking hands tied together. “As you say, it may be only because we’ve escaped the smoke,” Paschal goes on, in the corner of Laurent’s eye, “but your fever’s gone down, and your hands are healing mostly clean. That’s encouraging. I think so long as your poisoner stays gone, we may get you back to Marlas in one piece.”

“Good, that’s— that’s good to hear,” Damen says, with relief rattling like coins in his voice. “Thank you, Paschal.” Said with emphasis.

There’s a moment of quiet, like when happens when two people exchange significant looks, and then Paschal takes the brighter of the lamps and says, “I’ll go find the honey for your hands and be back, Exalted.”

“Thank you, Paschal,” Laurent says, dutiful, when the physician passes him, and the look Paschal gives him is very kind indeed he ducks outside the tent.

The night is chillier now than it was inland. The tepid breeze occasionally rallies enough strength to lift the tent’s canvas flap, offering tantalizing glimpses of the jinking shadows of pines beyond before the air calms and the canvas returns to its stolid drape. Laurent unknits his fingers slowly, feeling the hitch on each joint, and smooths them over the fabric of his pants.

“I suppose we could have been more subtle about it.”

It’s the first thing Damen has said to him directly since, two nights ago, he didn’t say anything at all. Laurent turns and looks at him because he has no excuse not to.

Damen’s mouth is half a smile, rueful, nudging up the dimple in his cheek. His curls tumble across his brow, picked out in bronze by the scuffed light of the remaining lantern. His hands are loose in his lap, his shirt draped over one knee. His eyes, dark and soft and lovely, watch Laurent.

Laurent doesn’t know what to say to him. Damen obviously expects _something,_ some reply or bit of banter, maybe he thinks he’s being kind, but Laurent doesn’t know what to do with kindness right now. He feels barely capable of meeting Damen’s eyes. _It appears you may survive my mistakes,_ he could say. _Congratulations._

Concern is taking over Damen’s half-shadowed features, fast and urgent. “Laurent, I shouldn't have—” he says. “This isn't your fault. None of this is your fault.”

Laurent stares, uncomprehending.

“Jokaste got herself wrapped up in all of this,” Damen continues. “Herself and the child. Not you. And what— what’s happening to me isn’t your fault, either. I never should have let you think it was. I’m so sorry.”

Laurent opens his mouth and does not close it, unable to wrench the sound up his throat. He suddenly feels one step from shattering, pulled from the kiln and turned to display every hairline fracture and set before the bath of ice. “...She was free for five years,” he eventually manages. “I didn’t—”

“No, Laurent, it _wasn’t your responsibility.”_ Damen jolts forward, forestalling protest. “Not yours alone. If you thought _you_ were avoiding the problem these last few years—” he laughs a little, weak and wry, one scabbed and callused hand rubbing over his eye, “I wanted so hard to avoid thinking about what she’d done. How she’d tried to manipulate me during the campaign, what it would mean to have her and the child in our lives again, and I, I admit that I thought you’d just solve it. Like you always do.”

There’s a cough in his chest that he dispenses with almost like an afterthought, tossed into the back of his hand and ignored entirely. He’s too busy looking at Laurent, his gaze as still and rooted as the crooked pines, uncaring of the flicker of the light, or his own uneven breath, or the feeling being peeled in sticky pieces from Laurent’s skin that is not panic, but could be.

“That was unfair to you,” Damen says to him, sincere as sunlight or the color of grass. “I think that was the unfairest thing I could have done. Especially knowing the entire time that you were thinking—”

He breaks off, suddenly rising, but there’s so little strength left in him. He makes it halfway off the bed, unbalanced and with a certain growing dread in his face, before the muscles of Laurent’s body have pushed his gibbering mind forward and closed his hands around Damen’s warm arm. The small contact forces the breath from them both, with the painful concussion of a blow.

Laurent draws them down to the bed slowly, so that Damen keeps his balance. Laurent faces the light, which means Damen does not, which means Laurent can almost pretend he doesn’t see the open emotion with which Damen is looking at Laurent’s hand on his arm.

They’re seated, at some point. With distant animal noises from the scrubby forest, and scraps of talk gusted in from the fire. Damen takes Laurent’s hand in his own and, with silent permission, slides their fingers together.

“Laurent, at your uncle’s trial—” he says, quiet, as careful with Laurent’s silences as he is with Laurent. “It’s never a mistake to do what you think is right. Or, well,” a breath of laughter, “maybe sometimes it is—”

Laurent smiles, finds he’s not forcing it, making it a reassurance for them both. “I was going to say.”

“I know, I know.” Damen’s answering grin could charm blood from a stone. “But it’s not— even if it was a mistake,” he says, “you don’t need to regret it.”

Laurent says, “We both nearly died.”

Damen shrugs, sweet mouth twitching. “Our courtship was frequently unconventional. It’s—” his voice drops a little, “don’t punish yourself. You don’t need to. I don’t want you to. Especially not when I’ve done so much stupider.”

He pauses to cough again, stronger this time, and though Laurent’s entire body seems to suddenly thrum like struck metal, Damen waves away his concern. “I’m fine,” he rumbles, between inhales. “It’ll pass.”

“Let me get you some water,” Laurent says, and rises.

There’d been a small waystation on the road back from Veirsa, where Laurent had bought more water for Damen while Ilsebe stood beside him at the bar and fretted herself into a sweat. He might have waited until he could’ve gone alone, but they’d been running out, and Damen’s fever still high.

The last of these waterskins is buried carefully beneath layer upon layer of Laurent’s clothing in his and Damen’s trunk, ensconced in a quilted ceremonial jacket that was packed mostly, Laurent suspects, because Felix has been more worried for Laurent than his luggage in the days before they left Marlas. He sets each folded shirt or pair of trousers aside in order in which they were packed— the same order as when he last checked on the water.

“So that’s where you’ve been keeping it,” Damen says, as Laurent begins to painstakingly replace each item taken from the trunk. “I’d wondered.”

Laurent pauses, sitting back on his heels. Guilt puts a few teeth into his skin. “Yes, I… didn’t think to tell you. Sorry.”

Damen waves him off again, takes a deep swig of the waterskin when handed it, and immediately pulls a face.

“A bit stale,” he says, with another cough. “Another acting troupe?”

“Very unlit roadside inn,” Laurent replies. “Lots of goats.”

“I think I can taste them.”

The gold light of the lamp feels more familiar than it did a few minutes ago. Laurent hasn’t had to stay in many camp tents since he took the throne, being allowed the tedious pleasure of watching regional lords stumble down their own grand staircases to offer him a room in their homes when he travels these days through the provinces, and so it makes him think (without any regard for nuance or subtlety) of the campaign against his uncle. The tent was more palatial then, and Damen more wary. He’d still trusted Laurent, though, and done well by him, and laid out upon the map-strewn table each night his intelligence and his faith and his love, as it lived between them then, week after endless week.

When Laurent retakes his seat on the bed, Damen’s arm comes up, tentatively, to curl around his shoulders. Laurent can tell without looking that Damen will withdraw it without complaint or accusation should he think Laurent needs that.

Laurent leans his head against Damen’s broad shoulder. He still hasn’t got his shirt on. Likely he hasn’t even noticed. His hand is warm against Laurent’s arm.

“So you harbor no dark feelings for me in your heart of hearts, I take it,” Laurent says, with a joking tone he doesn’t quite put his back into. He’s too tired to fight his own need for assurance.

Damen’s arm tightens immediately around him then releases, like a heartbeat. “No,” Damen replies. “Never.”

“Don't make promises you can't keep, now.”

“I’m not, I—” Damen pulls away, just enough that he can look down at Laurent and Laurent can look up at him. His hand remains on Laurent’s back, cupped over his spine. “I haven't been myself these past few days.”

“You have been a bit feverish,” Laurent says.

“No, not just that,” Damen insists, brow furrowed. “Even before the fever. I’ve— Laurent, I’ve been so scared. That she, or— whoever it is,” he says, “would kill me like my father. That I’d die weak and addled and unable to protect myself. It still—” he hesitates a moment, stubbled throat working as he swallows, and Laurent begins to understand, as he understands war or storm, the scope of what he has not seen. This is his real betrayal, after all. Not caring for Damen, simply because he did not think he could need care.

“I’m still scared,” Damen says. “I’m scared and I took it out on you. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t punish yourself,” Laurent says, and puts his hand to Damen’s rough cheek. “I don’t want you to.”

Damen’s gaze upon him is overbrimming. “I’ll try,” he says, and pulls Laurent back into his arms. Laurent goes.

“You were right about the girl, too,” Damen says, after a long moment in which they have both enjoyed watching Paschal try not to eavesdrop outside of the tent. His hand plays lightly through Laurent’s hair.

“...I like her,” Laurent says. “Quite a lot.”

“I know. I want to, too. You’re so good with her.”

“Well, she’s easy to be good with,” Laurent says, then sighs. “I’m sorry, I know that doesn’t help you.”

“No, it does, a little,” Damen replies, and there’s another breath before his fingers still in their meandering. “Are you scared, too?” he asks.

The lantern flickers gamely from the table. “Yes,” Laurent says. His hand closes over Damen’s. “Absolutely petrified. I… never thought I’d live long enough to have children.”

Damen’s breath stutters, and his lips find the crown of Laurent’s head. He says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Laurent squeezes his hand. There’s the sound of inexpert singing from outside the tent, sweet and lively and tied to no one language.

“We should perhaps tell Pascal he can come back in,” Laurent observes, after another long minute in which Damen’s eyelids have begun to droop. His bare chest jumps occasionally with coughs.

“Mm,” he replies, in a break between inhales.

“Are you falling asleep? You’ll crush me, you know, if you fall asleep like this.”

“Laurent,” he starts, in a quiet tone that’s like an axe being shoved down the hollow of Laurent’s spine, and then the fit starts.

It’s as bad as Imbros, as bad as anything since Marlas, Damen’s body pitching forward and over and nearly pulling Laurent to the floor even as his eyes fight to stay open and his arms tremble like grass. “Damen, breathe in,” Laurent says, struggling suddenly to hold him up, to keep him from collapsing entirely onto the dirt, “you have to breathe in.”

Damen can’t. He doesn’t get the chance. His fingers dig like chisels into Laurent’s arms. Laurent’s on the ground in front of him, trying to keep him from toppling, and then Laurent sees the waterskin left at Damen’s side, and he lunges, and the tent goes dark with a crash as his foot smacks the table and the lantern goes flying.

In darkness, his teeth pry the stopper out. He spits it to the floor and chugs. Sediment covers his tongue like fur.

Light returns in glory, with a shout, with Paschal, and Laurent has no time for him as poison soaks through his shirt and Damen coughs blood in bright splatters across it and Laurent says to him, nothing in his voice but a need for the answer, “Damen, who else touched our trunk? I saw it packed and unpacked every night, I didn’t tell anyone the water was in it, but who else came into the tent?”

There are no words left with which he can think about the coughing, with which he can describe it and pin it to paper and thus make it something capable of diminishment. It’s simply happening, and will never stop happening. “Don’t know,” Damen manages, red on his chin, his whole body shaking, barely able to keep his eyes open. “Can’t—” he heaves, and coughs, and says, “Can’t remember.”

He looks at Laurent, and he looks guilty, and apologetic, and terrified.

Paschal: “Your Majesty—”

“It’s alright,” Laurent says to Damen, “it’s alright, I should have told you where I kept it. It’s my fault.” Damen’s hand tightens painfully on his shoulder. “I could have told you and you could have— stay awake, lover, don’t close your eyes.”

Paschal shouts at him again, but Damen’s hand lands on his cheek, uncoordinated, almost like a slap, and Laurent barely notices. “Not your fault,” Damen says, wheezing it, the coughing easing only because his whole body is going slack, losing the thing that makes it a body and not some dark red sack of gut and bone.

His thumb is brushing across Laurent’s cheekbones, just under his eye. “‘M so happy,” Damen says to him. “ ‘M so happy.”

And then Paschal gets his hand down the back of Laurent’s collar and pulls.

Laurent catches himself barely, not fast enough to stop Paschal from dropping into his place in front of Damen and beginning to talk quickly and clearly. “Exalted, I need you to take a deep breath right now, as deep as you can—”

He rolls back one sleeve and shoves his fingers inside Damen’s mouth, as far as he can until Damen’s body lurches in a new way and he vomits clear streams of bile down Paschal’s front, the half-digested mess of lunch, the poison that is not visible but is unavoidably there. Paschal keeps talking, pushing Damen’s hair back from his face, putting his finger down his throat, forcing Damen to vomit again and again until it’s only the bile that comes up and then barely even that, just air, just the inhuman motion of it, and Laurent feels in himself the deadening of all thought and possibility as Damen’s eyes close and do not open again.

“He’s still breathing,” Paschal says. He’s trying to maneuver Damen back onto the bed. He’s standing over him. He’s touching his neck and checking his pulse. There’s blood on him, and bile, and blood on Laurent, and poison in his mouth, and the spot on his cheek where Damen’s hand touched him, and then there’s the whole rest of his body, but he can’t feel that, he can’t—

Laurent sucks down a breath, desperate for it. It doesn’t do anything. There isn’t anything. He can’t—

A notion presents itself, and is acted upon.

The backs of Paschal’s knees hit the open trunk and the physician nearly topples, his head forced up and back by Laurent’s hand dug into his jaw. His neck is bared to the knife Laurent pulled from the mess of their belongings. His hands are up and to the sides, away from Laurent, the shallow fluttering motion of his chest like a bird’s.

Laurent’s mind is a— wheel mired in mud, spokes are snapping and axles breaking, the oxen are dropping like flies. The blade in his hand cuts deeper, just a hair, and blood begins to stream brightly down Paschal’s neck.

 _“Was it you?”_ Laurent says, the sound dredged up from the mud and the muck and the dead-smelling center of him.

“No, sire,” Paschal says, the professional calm of his voice betrayed by his breath, his eyes, the sudden slide of sweat Laurent feels under his palm. Laurent’s fingers are like claws into Paschal’s sagging cheek.

“You knew I was hiding water. You knew exactly how weak Damen was. You’ve been closer to us than anyone else. _Was it you?”_

“It wasn’t, sire, I swear. I swear. My word on my family’s graves.”

_“And what could your word possibly mean to me?”_

Paschal’s breath is hot and damp against the side of Laurent’s palm. Blood is wicking into his collar. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing.”

Laurent’s breath goes whistling through his teeth. His hand on Paschal’s skin, his hand on the knife. Damen behind him, on the bed. He has known Paschal since his uncle used to fuck him into the sheets. Never once— not once— has Paschal lied to him. It’s a memory like a brand.

And, overshadowing, crushing, the knowledge forcing him down like a post into sod: _You have failed to do this alone._

Three more breaths, and then he drops the knife.

Paschal falls, finally stumbling over the trunk, one hand to his neck and his wrinkled eyes on Laurent. “How long does he have?” Laurent says, and Paschal shakes his head.

“I don’t know.”

“Will he wake up?”

“I don’t know.”

Laurent’s mouth twists unkindly. “Sire, you drank—” says Paschal, “you have to wash your mouth out. And probably vomit. Immediately.”

“I’ll find the time,” Laurent replies. He feels sharpened to a point, everything shaved away but for the ability to hurt. “Where are the nurse and the girl?”

“Ah,” Paschal says, and his eyes dart to the side.

Ilsebe stands at the opening of the tent, paler than chalk, a shaking hand clapped to her mouth. The other holds Theo’s face to her skirts. The child doesn’t protest. She catches a glimpse of Laurent through the bars of Ilsebe’s fingers, and shuts her eyes, and clings harder to the girl.

No point in asking how long they’ve been there.

“Convenient,” says Laurent. Then, to Ilsebe, “Can you wield a sword?”

“A— a little,” she stutters, too scared to make him wait for the answer, “her Ladyship—”

“How farsighted of her,” Laurent says, which makes Ilsebe shut up, and then he pulls two swords from the disorder of the dirt floor. The first, Damen’s, he keeps for himself. He gives his own much-lighter sword to Ilsebe. She fumbles it, Theo dodging the pommel with a high, fearful noise, but doesn’t let it drop.

“Stay here,” he tells her, and she flinches from his tone. “Both of you. Watch his—” _body._ “Watch Damianos. Is the rest of the troop still at the fire?”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Almost a whisper.

“Did they hear us shouting?”

“No, I— I don’t think so, your Majesty, Theo and I had just come to—”

“Go find a sword,” he says, turning to Paschal. “You and I are taking care of this tonight.”

Paschal is still on the ground, watching this exchange with all the attention of the next man at the gibbet. The bleeding from his neck has only mostly slowed. “Of—” he starts, to say, the beginning of a question, but Laurent finds he’s lacking perhaps the entirety of his patience tonight.

“Our little poisonous pest,” Laurent replies, with Ilsebe’s fear and Theo’s horror and Paschal’s splintering calm all pressing against his ribs like hoops around a barrel already long-since bound, “as I should have done weeks ago. Go get a sword.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for the lovely comments! your kindness and patience in re: the Great 2017-2018 Hiatus is deeply, deeply appreciated!! i think i can, quite definitively, that the next chapter will be the last.


	7. Chapter 7

This would be better done in daylight. When Laurent could see the sudden emergence of fear in each of his men’s faces.

“There’s no one on watch, sire,” Lazar is saying, with the firelight stark across his plain features, “I was about to send out—”

“That’s no longer necessary,” Laurent says. “Remove your sword.”

“Sire?” Lazar says, staring.

Laurent puts his hand to the pommel of his sword. “I didn’t stutter.”

Eight pairs of eyes are on him. Lazar, his ranking officer, and Pallas and Amelot, of the Kings’ Guard. Athamas and Evrard, veterans of the campaign through Sicyon. Tychaeus and Isolde, chosen by Jord from among the palace guards. Alienor, hand-picked by his spymaster. They are all that’s left. The rest are gone. Dead, like the Thracian, or dying, like Damen, or run back to Marlas by Laurent’s cold estimations, like Felix and a dozen more.

Laurent, through his negligence and his stupidity, created this situation. Now he will resolve it.

Lazar’s sword falls to the dirt with a dull thud, no sound in the dry black forest but it and the fire and the wind.

“All of you, on your knees,” Laurent says to his rapt audience. _“Now.”_

They move quickly. A few truly ambitious individuals get their swords off before they drop to the ground, though most of them aren’t armed. Action was expected in the morning, against a different enemy. “Put your hands behind your back,” he says, and they all do. Lazar is the only one still making eye contact.

“King Damianos has been poisoned three times in the past month by means of an unknown substance slipped into his food and infused in the oil used to clean his tack,” Laurent says, in the even tones he uses to dictate letters and read contracts. “This evening, he was poisoned again.”

Shock, maybe, in some of their faces, but very little. He was sick, they all knew. Some could likely see even have seen that he was dying. They had eyes. Paschal has emerged from the shadows around the wagon, grey-faced and his lips a thin line, still lacking a sword. At Laurent’s nod, he bends to take Lazar’s.

“The Exalted will likely be dead by morning,” Laurent says. There’s a shiver of motion through some of the kneeling bodies, some muffled noise from one. Tychaeus maybe, accomplished but very young. “Unfortunately, I don’t think he’ll be answering any of my questions before he goes. I would like to know what he was poisoned with, to begin my list, and how. I would like to know why his poisoner never bothered to kill him outright, despite the many opportunities they apparently had to do so. I would like to know who they work for. I would like to know why they chose to make him die slow. I would like to know which of you did it.”

His voice does not waver, his hand on his sword is steady. He doesn’t pace, doesn’t circle his victims like his uncle sometimes cared to, doesn’t flinch from the fire when it bursts up with another gust of wind.

The night is dark and clouded, the moon and stars all carefully hidden away. Paschal’s grip around his sword is as white-knuckled as it is sloppy. “Well?” Laurent says. “Any volunteers?”

The answering silence is similar to the kind one experiences on mountain slopes, when the expedition has just noticed the cracks in the snow.

“There is no secret saboteur following us from afar,” Laurent explains, with a great patience in his voice, “nor could our supplies simply have been poisoned at the castle and slipped into our bags. One of you ten loyal soldiers has done this. At sure risk to yourself, I might add. You could not have expected to escape execution riding along with us, and be assured you will not. You will die for your cause. True martyrdom is such a rarity.”

It’s been grinding at him, like a bit he cannot spit out, why their poisoner seems to act with such personal, single-minded malice. So much of this plot has been mere politics— taking a hostage who you leave instructions not to hurt, arming a foreign rebellion but instigating no war. Messy politics, certainly, with its own inscrutable motivation that he suspects Jokaste will have more to say upon then she has so far been able— but nothing like their poisoner. Nothing like this implacable desire to hurt. To punish.

“Seeing no claimants,” Laurent says, scanning the line of men and women with narrowed eyes, and then he points. “Paschal, a few feet into the trees. Let the animals clean up the mess.”

Pallas starts when Paschal gets a hand to the back of Tychaeus’ neck, pulling the young man up and over his own feet, making him stumble, pushing him into the trees. There’s snot on his face, running in a thick line down from his nose, too obedient to Laurent’s orders to even wipe it away as he’d knelt, and he looks back and forth between Paschal and Laurent with the pleading confusion of a hounddog. Pallas twists his spine painfully to watch them, almost rising before Lazar butts a warning shoulder into his side, and then Paschal and Tychaeus have disappeared among the shadows, and then there is nothing, and then Tychaeus screams.

It’s high, and prolonged, and terrible. Paschal does his work well.

Now the eyes on Laurent are wide with unabashed horror, arms trembling, mouths wide. Pallas’ confusion is not dissimilar to Tychaeus’, Amelot has begun to cry. Alienor keeps her eyes fixed to the dirt, her back as rigid as glass. And still not a one of them rises, not a one of them reaches for their swords. One among them is a very accomplished liar, of course, but the rest are held in place by Laurent, by one man with a sword who can barely even feel his heart in his chest, who must force himself in each second to blink and breathe and swallow.

He can’t even be certain he’s angry anymore. Emotion is so distant from wherever it is he’s been put. He simply knows that Damen coughed until blood smeared his teeth and dripped from his chin and that tonight Laurent is going to put his sword through someone’s throat.

“Let our regicide stand now and no one else will die,” Laurent says. “Or don’t, and then everyone will die. My goals are accomplished either way. But maybe you save yourself that last smidgen of dishonor.”

“Sire,” Pallas starts, no longer able to help himself, a true-blooded Akielon to his dying breath _._ “I swear, none of your men would ever—”

Laurent steps forward and slaps him open-palm across the face. Nice and loud. Pallas falls back on one elbow, shock as vivid across his features as the imprint of Laurent’s hand. Lazar sucks in a breath, sweat bright down his face, but doesn’t move to help. Lazar is a true-blooded Veretian, and knows how to survive a tyrant.

Paschal stands at the edge of their little clearing, alone, wiping his sword on the bloody hem of his tunic. Laurent juts his chin towards Pallas. “Him next. Let’s keep things moving.”

“Sire—” Pallas says as Lazar, all good sense forgotten, shouts, “No, you _can’t—”_

He’s stopped by the tip of Laurent’s sword against his neck. The expression on his face is very likely hatred. “You’ll get your chance,” Laurent tells him, and then Paschal has finished whispering in Pallas’ ear and is pulling him bodily into the trees.

Laurent watches closely this time when the screaming starts. Calm is easy to fake, he knows, but fear is harder. Fear has such an individual quality. Amelot’s quiet snuffles have become sobs now, breathless and wrenching, and Isolde’s quick glances in her direction are increasingly frantic. Evrard has, without much fanfare, pissed himself. Lazar’s breathing, as Pallas’ screams continue, is starting to slip into hysteria. Athamas is praying. Alienor is—

It pummels him, unsparing.

Her arms are tight behind her back, she’s gripping her own elbows. Her shoulders pull together like a cinch.

He sheathes his sword, draws his knife. The fire is suddenly louder, the clearing bright as day with its light, every silver thread in Alienor’s hair as reflective as glass. He’s standing over her, and he takes it, he takes her hair in his hand, and then he takes the knife and he slices open her shirt.

He isn’t careful. He scores the flesh, making her shout, but when he pulls the shreds of her shirt back there is only one wound across her shoulder blade and he has made it, there is no bandage, there is no puncture, there was no—

“Archer in Imbros,” he says, out loud, surrounded by seven terrified soldiers and holding Alienor’s knotted hair tight in his fist. There’s blood down her back, on his knife, and she doesn’t look up even as Laurent’s fingers pull harder on her scalp.

She’s a high-born Veretian. She has no practice aping fear.

“You didn’t want me to question Volsget’s officer,” Laurent says, the words snapping sharply into place as he says them, “you didn’t want me to ask where his sword came from, where his Veretian sword came from, so you conjured up an archer and created a fight. We never found the last body.” There’s something happening to his ears, the fire hasn’t stopped getting louder, it keeps cresting and cresting like a wave that won’t break.

“You killed the Thracian,” he says. “I can’t even remember his name.”

And then: _“You were at the fucking banquet.”_

In Marlas, to celebrate the negotiations— well-dressed, laughing politely, her arm in some Akielon nobleman’s, a spot of wine dashed across her fine skirts. She was at the banquet and she was in the fort and she has travelled with them these past two weeks and Laurent had _relied upon her,_ he put Theo _into her arms._

His heart is battering his ribs, it’s bruising itself and shoving up his throat and it does not slow. He’s going to kill her. He’s going to do it slowly. He’s not even going to take pleasure from it. But he’s going to do it.

He releases her hair and shoves her back with a foot against her chest. She lands flat in the ash and dirt, her arms trapped behind her back, but doesn’t shout again, doesn’t toss some curse at Laurent. Even when he puts his boot to her throat and bears down, she lets him. Her hair is tossed back from her face in a sprawling snarl, and it’s the first time he’s seen her features clearly all night.

She’s grinning at him, pale lips ripped back from her teeth, entire face contorted in bloody satisfaction.

“What did you give him?” Laurent snarls. “What poison did you give him?”

She bucks once, reflexive, when he presses harder against her windpipe, purple staining her face in rising blotches, but she doesn’t answer. She has no plans to answer. She doesn’t even do Laurent the courtesy of resisting, just keeps her hands obediently behind her back and smiles at him with all the necrotic charm of Vere’s finest.

There are voices shouting at him. He can’t hear them. Damen isn’t here to expect better of him. Damen is dying in a tent in the middle of a backwater.

“Who’s paying you?” he shouts at her, “will you die for them, too?” But then he’s wrong, he’s wrong _again,_ and he says, “Who’s paying Martine?”

It rips the flesh from his throat on the way up. Martine’s recommendation put her in this troop, her every report has been sent back to Martine. Martine whom he has trusted, like a _fool,_ utterly blind to what was going—

“I serve no bastard swine!” Alienor howls, the handsome mask of her face suddenly cracked and rotting as she arches her back and thrashes. “Long live the Kingdom of Vere!”

She gets an arm free and pulls a knife from some secret sheath at her back. Laurent kicks her in the head.

He’s about to do it again, harder, when someone grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him around.

There’s people, too many people, all of them looking at him and saying things to him, they’ve been saying things to him for several long seconds now and Paschal is first among them, lined face grim, saying—

“—Jokaste!”

“What?” Laurent manages. He’s still seeing Damen unconscious on a camp bed, and Theo hiding her face in Ilsebe’s skirts, and the way Alienor bit into her own tongue when his foot connected.

He could kick her again. Her head is lolling senseless in the dirt. He should kick her again. Make something wet and soft and pink splatter over his boot tops.

He wrenches his mind back on to track with nauseating effort.

“You two, get her up,” he says to Amelot and Isolde, who are kneeling still but look less sure about it as Pallas lets Lazar take him into his arms and kiss him desperately and Tychaeus stumbles forward into the firelight. “All of you get up, no one is dead yet. Tie her hands, cut her heels if she tries to run. Maybe cut them anyways. And now you,” he says, turning back to Paschal.

Paschal thrusts a piece of paper into his hand.

The wind is picking up, the clouds slowly slipping away. By the light of the fire and the emerging stars he unfolds the bloodied little scrap and reads upon it: _Revest-et-Mont._ In Jokaste’s dashed hand.

“You need to go get her,” Paschal is saying, insistent, and when Laurent looks back up at him he’s surrounded, there’s a messenger in Veretian livery heaving for breath and looking near-death, there’s Ilsebe, for some reason, Theo held awkward and terrified on her hip, there’s his men, still dragging themselves out of horror, the smell of urine lingering too-strong in the air, Alienor away and to his left, being pulled stumbling on, spitting invectives with a bloodied tongue—

He looks down at the note. He reads it again.

“I came straight from the bay,” says the rider, so dry-mouthed he sounds like a man three times his age.

“They’ll kill her for this, sire, she won’t live the night,” says Ilsebe. She’s wild-eyed, arm around Theo too tight to be comfortable, and Laurent wonders why she even brought the girl out to see this, except there’s nowhere else for her to be.

“Now, sire, you must,” says Paschal, and then Laurent’s mind finishes its plunge into blackest memory and he crumples the note in his fist and he says to Paschal, “It’s the mines. It’s the sickness from the mines.”

Paschal is staring at him. He doesn’t understand. “Lady Genevote of Varenne made her miners sick by the dozens,” Laurent says, clipped and low, needing to say this as quickly as it can be heard. “Their families, too, everyone who lived within ten miles of the mines. It was a poison in the groundwater, she’d dug too deep and flooded one of the pits, when my foreman seized her operations she had to board up all the wells, buy out every farmer—” he’s getting lost, he has to tell him: “Genevote’s manor-seat is Revest-et-Mont. She shipped the poison to Alienor in Marlas and the weapons to Volsget. Jokaste only had to see a manifest—”

Paschal’s eyes are round as plates, his mouth starting to move. His hand digs deep into Laurent’s arm. He says, “Laurent, if he wakes up he’ll live.”

Laurent barely breathes. He doesn’t dare to.

“I saw the reports from Varenne,” Paschal continues, as fast as Laurent was, “I spoke with your foreman when she returned to Marlas a few months ago. The poison from the mines— it kills quickly in large doses, and it can kill over time in smaller doses, the poison takes so long to leave the body, but it _does_ leave the body eventually. Some of the miners and their families survived it, even the ones who lost consciousness. He’s still breathing and his color’s good— he could live. He could even recover.”

Paschal doesn’t lie to him. “And if he doesn’t wake up?”

“Then he doesn’t wake up,” Paschal replies, the only answer to so absurd a question, but still somehow required. Laurent can reassemble the scattered pieces of his reason now, claw his way back to even the barest level of sensibility. He turns from Paschal and starts giving orders.

“Athamas, Tychaeus, Isolde,” he says, meeting each one’s eyes as he rattles off their names, “you’re coming with me to Governor Volsget’s mansion to retrieve the Lady Jokaste of Aegina.”

There’s a relieved noise from Ilsebe, and some baffled stares from the assembled soldiers. It’s the first time most of them have heard Laurent actually explain their reasons for being in Patras. A night full of surprises.

“Amelot and Evrard, I entrust the martyr to you. Deprive her of as much flesh as necessary to make her talk. Whatever she says, write it down. Can either of you write?” Amelot nods, slightly too fast. “Fortuitous. You two,” he says, and turns to Pallas and Lazar, and pauses.

Lazar has Pallas’ hand clutched tight to his side, shivering lightly even in the balmy night, shirt dark down to the waist with sweat. Pallas, at his shoulder, looks between Laurent and the look Lazar is giving Laurent with worry, seemingly, for both.

Laurent can’t apologize to him. He is his king. “If I thought there was another way to expose her quickly, I would have done it.”

He doesn’t know if that’s true. It was fast, and he got the result he wanted, but he thinks maybe he wanted the violence, too, the way they all looked at him when Paschal convinced Tychaeus to scream.

Lazar, who has no recourse by which to call his sovereign a liar, nods slowly. Laurent can see Pallas’ thumb moving in small circles over the back of Lazar’s hand. “Of course, sire,” Lazar says.

“Watch Theomache and the nurse. Watch Damianos. If I don’t return by midmorning, get them all back to Marlas as fast as you can.”

He says a few words to Ilsebe, who still has Theo clutched tight to her hip despite the visible tremor of her arms. He thanks the messenger, who only found their small camp among the trees after more than a hour of back and forth along the road, knowing only from the other messengers where they were meant to be by this evening.

The tabard of his livery is decorated all along the hemline with the Veretian fleur-de-lis. Another of Alienor’s lies that Laurent swallowed whole.

He doesn’t say much to Paschal, when it comes time for that. Laurent does not have the capacity for such gratitude at the moment, and Paschal lacks the ability to receive it. Paschal puts his hand to Laurent’s shoulder and wishes him luck, and that’s enough.

He has someone bring him his cloak from the tent. He can’t do it himself. He’d stay, if he went in. No meaningful part of him would ever leave.

The air is clearer out on the road, no woodsmoke up Laurent’s nose, no wavering shadows of cedars striping over his vision. The moonlight is bare but enough— they won’t snap their necks riding the horses into a ditch. Isolde pauses as they make the turn towards the bay and Volsget’s mansion, pulling back her chestnut’s head, and Laurent pauses with her.

“What?”

“There’s a light at the horizon, sire. Small, but it could be riders if they’re carrying a torch.”

Laurent squints in the direction she points and sees only undifferentiated night. His dark vision hasn’t recovered from the light of the campfire, or, potentially, isn’t nearly as good as Isolde’s.

He and Isolde are facing the border with Akielos. The westerly wind tugs at Laurent’s hair, whipping it into the corners of his mouth, dragging at the cuffs of his sleeves. His cuirass was left behind with the caravan outside Imbros, a move that seemed to lack consequence at the time. He has no armor but his bracers. His weapons, against one of Patras’ greatest military heroes, are a sword, a knife, and three men out of what was once a company of twelve. Thirteen, if one includes the King of Akielos.

“They’re not coming from the direction of the governor’s house,” he says. “The rest of the troop won’t be found by anyone not already aware of where they are. If it’s riders, they’ll pass them by.”

It will have to be true. Laurent kicks his heels into Tiffy’s sides and turns them all east.

 

* * *

 

They ride hard, hours along the trade road and every one that branches from it towards Tenfleet Bay, riding until the horses are flecked with sweat and spit and the moon has sunk below the horizon. An hour perhaps before the morning star will rise, when the night feels infinite and without escape, they reach Governor Volsget’s mansion.

The mansion itself is a sprawling pile of whitewashed stone, ringed by a dense maze of outbuildings and gardens and the entire thing lying recumbent upon the clifftop as it watches over the town proper on the shore below and the harbor beyond. A curtain wall may once have enclosed the entirety of the compound but now protects the hall only where it faces the sea, an artefact of many generations of squabbles at sea and very few at all on the mainland.

There’s the light of ongoing construction at the edges of the wall, though, where it curves back around the main house and its surrounding buildings. As if Volsget may soon have need of a more complete defense.

Laurent and his soldiers dismount at the base of the last hill up to the mansion, picketing the exhausted horses between two wind-bent junipers and ascending on foot. It’s slow going on the dry, yellow dirt, and Laurent nearly loses his footing before Athamas catches his elbow and helps him back up.

Laurent thanks him. Athamas, who served under Theomedes and still somewhat expects to be thrown on the pyre for touching the King-Consort with his dirty common hands, nods quickly and looks away.

There’s a gap between the scrubby coastal forests of the hill and the ancient gardens of the mansion, a break in the foliage where the rear wall must once have stood, and they pause there, on their bellies among the crackling grasses. “There’s something going on at that paddock there,” Isolde says, being possessed of an acuity of vision Laurent has never before seen in another human being, “look.”

Laurent tries. It’s well distant, and the stars dim, and there’s an odd pale halo to every object his eyes focus upon, a symptom of exhaustion that has dogged him for a day at least. He scrubs a hand across his aching eyes and looks again.

There, yes, in a gap between the gatehouses, figures moving quickly in front of the light spilling from one of the barracks. When he holds his breath, he can hear the sounds of shouting, and horses in distress. Quite the commotion for three hours before dawn, even for a company preparing for war.

“Let’s hope whatever it is keeps them occupied,” Laurent says, low. “Follow me.”

He studied maps of the cliffs and the mansion, in Marlas and while they travelled. Most of them were old, drawn up fifty years after Volsget killed enough pirates to claim the old Governor’s seat, but there have luckily been few major changes. It’s enough to lead his soldiers across the tree-break and around the gatehouses and between the first of the salt-stained outbuildings without incident. A few of the more important recent changes, such as the lookout towers built along the cliff sides, were passed to Martine by King Torgeir’s spies before they rode out, and he incorporates that, too.

Martine is—

Laurent can agree with Alienor that she did not work on the orders of Martine. The hatred like nausea in the woman’s face when he’d mentioned his spymaster had been genuine— it was an expression Laurent knew very well, at one point in his life. But still he has questions now, sunk deep into his mind, that he cannot answer with the information at hand. It’s a keen irritation that he has to set them aside and motion for the men to stop in the shadow of a darkened forge.

“Tower,” he whispers, pointing up at the sturdy brick structure a few hundred yards away. The guards that staff the towers are meant to watch the ocean, but he wouldn’t put it beyond Volsget to have them watch the mansion, too, considering the prisoner locked inside. And his soldiers, despite what he assumes are their many other wonderful qualities, are no great hands at stealth. Tychaeus is built on the approximate proportions of a mountainside, and Athamus wears the traditional expression of an old Akielon campaigner denied the honor of meeting his enemy head-on in a large field in broad daylight.

“Isolde?” Laurent prompts, and she pulls an eyeglass from a pouch at her waist.

“No one there, sire,” she says after a moment of careful observation, looking a little confused when she lowers the glass.

“You’re sure?” he says, as surprised as her.

“Aye, I can see every star where a head should be.” She scratches a hand through the curled dark hairs around her ears and, at Laurent’s request, leans carefully around the corner of the forge to spy the next tower down the cliff.

“That one’s empty, too, sire,” she says, pulling back from the light of the occupied buildings. “Where are all the watchmen?”

“Dead, ideally,” Laurent replies, to a startled chuckle from Athamus. “Let’s go, then, before they all scrabble back from the confines of the grave.”

The rest of the approach to the main house, though it takes them another fifteen careful minutes, is similarly uneventful. All the guards Laurent assumed would be on watch, was told would be on watch by his succession of messengers who stopped by the mansion over the past two weeks, are nowhere to be found. He can hear them, shouting by the paddock Isolde spied and visible as hurrying silhouettes in the windows of some of the buildings, but they are otherwise thin on the ground. The high, stringing note of Laurent’s unease ups its pitch.

A small herb garden to the side of the mansion reveals an equally small door, helped off its hinges by a good run-up and Tychaeus’ massive shoulder. The door reveals a stillroom stinking strongly of vinegar-- wiith Tychaeus and his two small friends crouching behind a vat, Laurent leans his head out the door to peek into the interior hall.

And immediately pulls it back as two men in Volsget’s livery, swords drawn and faces pouring sweat, go sprinting down the corridor.

“Alright,” Laurent says, drawing the word out, his heart pounding at the speed of an uncontrolled downhill gallop. “It appears some of the guard yet live.”

He counts out another minute, back pressed flat against the cool, unfinished stone of the stillroom wall, then peers once more around the doorframe. The corridor, long and sparsely decorated but for the intricate reliefs banded across its ceiling, remains empty. Also surprisingly well-lit, considering the hour.

“Something is almost certainly up,” Laurent says under his breath, and then is forced to watch from the corner of his eye as Tychaeus starts scanning the ceiling.

They bundle out of the stillroom and start jogging south down the corridor, swords drawn. Laurent’s knowledge of the grounds ended at the mansion walls, and he fully expects to retrace his steps several times before the morning comes. Ilsebe had done her best to describe the interior rooms to him, but her knowledge had been limited by her own captivity and Jokaste may easily have been moved. Laurent keeps an eye out for stairs down to the cellars. In case Volsget, in a fit of good sense, shoved her into a jail cell.

The first several doors they pass all look into servants’ rooms— kitchens, sculleries, laundries, rooms stacked to the ceilings with clean linens. They’re all bafflingly empty. Even the kitchens, which should have been bustling with bakers and bakers’ assistants for a household of this size, are devoid of life. Laurent signals a pause at the end of the hall and gestures Isolde around the corner. She nods, and ducks off.

Laurent knows what a grand house is supposed to look like, how bustling and crowded and lively it should feel even at the oddest hours of the night. They’ve travelled nearly the length of the mansion without encountering anyone but for those first two guards. Something has happened in Volsget’s manor, and Laurent suspects he knows who’s to blame.

“There’s no one, sire,” Isolde whispers, darting back into view. Her helmet is under her arm, her short hair spiked straight out from her head with sweat. “It’s servants’ quarters, even some barracks for the Governor’s guard, but there’s no one there. Everything’s empty.”

Laurent drags a hand over one eye. He’s either going to die tonight or sleep for two weeks straight starting tomorrow. “Further mysteries. Did you see any stairs belowground?”

“I think so. There were a few locked doors at the end of the hall that I didn’t try, but one had a cold draft coming up from the bottom, and the door itself looked heavy. Some of the rooms also, uh,” she wrinkles her nose, “stink.”

“Blood?”

“No, uh, shit, sire. And vomit?”

“Was there a _plague?”_ Laurent hisses, as his mental reckoning of what exactly he’s walked into starts to go up in flames. Isolde only shrugs helplessly and leads the way back down the corridor.

It does indeed reek of sickness, though only, Laurent notes, from the guards’ rooms. The servant rooms are empty but clean. He shakes his head at a mystery he has no answer to and keeps running. The door Isolde points him to just before the next bend in the hall certainly looks cellar-appropriate— large, heavy, a plethora of iron studs. He’s just reaching for the handle when the door beside it, previously locked, unlatches with a _snick._

Three men of Volsget’s guard step out, buckling their sword belts. At the sight of Laurent, his three soldiers, and the four drawn swords between them, the guards stop. They stare. The combined Veretian-Akielon delegation stare back.

“Tychaeus?” Laurent says, with two fingers frozen on the door handle.

And then Tychaeus, a lad of good barn-sized Southern stock, barrels all three guards back into the room they came from and slams the door shut behind him. “I’ll help the boy, sire!” Athamas says, wrenches the door to the guardroom open, hollers something unintelligible in Isthmian slang, and disappears. The muffled sounds of a very close-quarters fight erupt.

“Akielons,” Isolde mutters under her breath, and flushes brightly when Laurent shoots her a grin. If it has an edge of profound mania, she doesn’t notice. They heave open the door to the cellars together, and take the stairs down at a run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all i must have been out of my goddamn mind last chapter. this is not the final chapter. it is not even the second-to-last. chapter 8 will be up on saturday or sunday, and chapter 9 will be up on tuesday, and i know chapter 9 will be the last chapter because i have already fucking written it. as ever, thank you for every single comment.


	8. Chapter 8

The cellars below are equally as massive as the house above. Still jogging, careful of the chilly puddles collecting in the hollows of the rough floor, Laurent and Isolde pass storerooms, wine racks, countless locked doors and half-crumbled doorways, and then, after ten breathless minutes and a certain erosion of Laurent’s confidence in his navigational ability, they hear the screams.

They’re loud, enormously loud, like cannonshot echoing down the guttering light of the hall. Isolde gasps and Laurent picks up the pace, legs burning, every footprint a sharp wet slap against the stone until they reach the corner. Then he throws out a hand, slamming his palm against the wall, and skids around into the adjoining hall with his sword raised.

He’s staring right through the open bars of the jail cell. He sees the heavy chair, and the snapped leather ties around its arms, and the body of the brute-faced man still spurting blood across the floor— and he sees Jokaste, the great gold curtain of her hair heaving down her back, who pulls the sword from the brute-faced man’s throat, spits, then breaks his nose with one smash of her bare heel.

She rounds on the cell door. Her usually symmetrical face is a mass of bruise, one eye huge and purple and swollen shut. Her pants and shirt, both in the Veretian style, are filthy with old muck and sweat, and the entirety of her left thigh is drenched in blood. Laurent’s eyebrows begin an unhurried ascent when he notices the missing fingers on her left hand— the last two, sawed off right at the second knuckle and sputtering blood from the open veins onto the already-drenched floor. 

And then Jokaste screams, _“Where is my daughter?”_ and Laurent must use the entirety of his willpower to keep his hands from raising in instinctive surrender.

“She’s safe,” Laurent says, voice as steady as a lifetime in the court of Arles could ever make it. “She’s with Ilsebe, Damianos, and six armed soldiers camped three hours west of here. We picked her up from the trading caravan at Imbros. She’s eager to see you.”

The bellows of Jokaste’s chest heaves twice more, her one eye on Laurent showing white all the way around, and then she breaks. She drops the sword and puts her palms to her forehead, hiding her face behind the bars of her wrists as she sobs once, powerfully, like a punch to the sternum, and the stumps of her fingers trickle little scarlet ribbons all through her hair.

“We could come back later,” Laurent says, and Jokaste drops her five-fingered hand to shoot him an absolutely murderous glare.

“I think you’re late enough already, your _Majesty_ ,” she snarls, and starts trying, without lowering her bleeding hand from above her head, to rip off one of her own sleeves. 

“I’m not sure you needed our help at all, your Ladyship,” Laurent replies, unbuckling his sword belt, tossing it to a wide-eyed Isolde, and starting to rip out the laces of his jacket. “You certainly seem to have taken care of your torturer alright. I see you’ve really improved with the blade.”

“Yes, and I see _you’re_ still short and _tiresome,”_ Jokaste snaps, bloody fingers finding little purchase at the seam at her shoulder.

Laurent, whose eyes are exactly level with Jokaste’s, raises an eyebrow. He holds out the dismembered sleeve of his jacket. Jokaste makes another ungrateful noise and snatches it from his hand.

Jokaste, beneath the blood and bruises and other symptoms of a good few hours of torture, is not dramatically changed from the last time Laurent laid eyes upon her. Stunning blue eye, full lips, high cheeks, a certain indictment of his husband’s continuity of taste, thick and shining hair. There’s a few more lines pressed into the pale skin around her eyes and mouth, the same ones that have grown up in Damen’s features over the past few years, and the curve of her hips and belly is rounder than it once was, her arms more muscled, but she is physically as Laurent remembers from the road to Kingsmeet. 

In other ways, how she sobbed for her daughter and pled for her life and bargained, as best she could, for Ilsebe’s rescue, she seems to have changed immeasurably. 

“That’s not going to work at all,” Laurent remarks as Jokaste fumbles the sleeve-turned-bandage and attempts to further impale him on the monocular glare of her hatred. “Isolde, could you help her Ladyship with her field dressing?”

Isolde, a credit to her nation, shoves hers and Laurent’s swords under her arm and steps forward with only minor trepidation. Jokaste, the battered lion in the moralistic fable, holds still and deigns to be helped, letting Isolde wrap the silk tightly around the stumps.

“And since we have you here,” Laurent says, conversational, as Isolde works, “I’d like some questions answered.”

“I’m sure you would,” Jokaste mutters, which Laurent ignores.

“Alienor Duval, assuredly not her real name, has worked on the orders of Genevote of Varenne to poison Damianos four times in the past month using a poison derived from the same mining wastewater that led me to seize half of Genevote’s holdings in the fall of this past year,” Laurent says, and cannot keep himself from pacing this time, the frenetic energy that has propelled him this far into Volsget’s camp no longer a force to be stopped. It’s a small cell, five steps from wall to wall, but the ridiculousness of his circling is beyond care. “Alienor has supposedly spent the past two years in my employ as a spy, but has since evinced some isolationist tendencies— she said ‘long live the _Kingdom_ of Vere’ when she tried to stab me in the ankle,” Laurent adds to Isolde, who had been suppressing the question, “not King. My close alliance with Akielos has never been well-received by a particular segment of the nobility, including, apparently, whatever family Alienor came from.”

“She could be a Beauvau,” Jokaste cuts in.

“I hanged all the Beauvaus,” Laurent replies. Four of them, from a gibbet in the fields outside Arles that was dismantled as soon as the deed was done. The remains of the conspirators were buried without marker, and their children shipped to noble homes in Akielos. No adults of the family survived.

“No you certainly did not,” Jokaste says, gritting her teeth as Isolde begins wrapping a second strip of cotton, pulled from her own hem, around Jokaste’s hand. “Robert Beauvau’s nephew tried to fuck me in Ladehors last winter.”

Laurent stops in his pacing with a bloody splash. “Robert had a _nephew?”_

“A wild pack of them. Nieces, too. His sister, Philpote de Montclair— her husband was not one to let a woman of childbearing age rest on her laurels. Finally killed her with the last one.”

“Well fine, perhaps she’s a long-lost Beauvau. Regardless—” Laurent begins to say, and then stops, one hand frozen in an incipient wave of dismissal. “Philpote’s husband, he was in disgrace? That was why the family never spoke of him at the trial, why he wasn’t involved in the coup attempt?”

“I’d imagine so. He died fifteen years ago at least, but from all the sobbing Robert did on my breasts it sounded like he hadn’t been welcome in court for at least thirty.”’

“Sired a bastard?”

Jokaste narrows her one narrowable eye. “Yes. Lucky guess?”

“Of course not,” Laurent says with a frown, eyes fixed to one stone among many in the grime-slick wall, and then he turns back to Jokaste. “Regardless of the traitor’s provenance, what I want to know is why _you_ are involved in this. Genevote has gone to absolutely extraordinary lengths up to and including _arming a Patran rebellion_ in order to implicate you in Damianos’ death. Tell me why. Now.”

Jokaste’s hand is as bandaged as it’s going to get. She holds it beside her heart as Isolde steps back. Her straight-backed posture may once have been practiced, but now, she seems to say, it is the only way she could possibly stand— sure of the exact nature of her world and her place within it.

“I don’t—”

Laurent holds up a hand. “Before you lie to me, remember that I saved your life once. I am not obligated to do it again.”

Jokaste’s face wrinkles with a grimace that must pull painfully at her bruises. Laurent watches her swallow her first reply, then her second, and then she says, “Genevote is a rabid bitch who tried to kill me and kidnap Theo the year before last in Kempt, so I seduced her spy in Königinheim, exposed him to the court, then tipped off your provincial overseer in Varenne about all the commoners she kept killing. That will likely have been part of it.”

Laurent’s head jerks back before he can stop it. “That’s insane.”

“I’d like to see what kind of plan you can orchestrate when—”

“No, obviously that worked out rather well and thank you for helping me save some three hundred farmers—I meant _Genevote_ is insane,” Laurent says, cutting over her, and Jokaste looks at him with an expression he is absolutely certain he’s never seen her bare before. 

“You’re—” she starts, and then Isolde says, in a very urgent whisper, _“Sire!”_

Jokaste breaks off, hair whipping behind her in a burnished sheet as Isolde, grey-faced but with a soldier’s calm, peers back around the way they came and Laurent hears the growing thunder of booted feet down bare cellar floors. There’s shouting, too, and the flickering light of torches. 

“I suppose it was too much to hope that we could have gone undiscovered forever,” Laurent says with a grumble, finally taking his sword back from Isolde as Jokaste attempts in vain to tie her long hair up. 

“Yes, so sorry you couldn’t expend any _less_ effort in this rescue attempt,” Jokaste snaps as she finally gives up, tosses her hair over her shoulder, and snatches the dead man’s sword from his blood-blackened throat. Pieces of his nose are still splashed up the back of her calf. They’re going to have to find her shoes quickly.

“Would you like to take credit for all the empty barracks upstairs now, or wait until I ask with the appropriate wonder?”

Jokaste sneers at him. Isolde gestures them frantically into the corridor. They take off at a jog, Jokaste pale and sweating heavily but maintaining an admirable derision in her voice as she says, “I thrill to imagine how far you would have gotten if I hadn’t poisoned half his men for you.”

Laurent shoots her a pointed look as Isolde moves into the lead, checking every cobwebbed alcove they pass for another set of stairs. “Fatally or to incapacitate?”

“To incapacitate, of course.”

“And the servants?”

“Persuaded them all the mansion was haunted and sent them running back to town days ago. Please, I know who my enemies are.”

“Don’t we all,” Laurent says with a grin.

She’s going to spit on him, if he slows down enough to let her. 

The hallways grow more tangled as they move beneath the oldest wings of the house, the ceiling dropping low and the floors turning slick with centuries of use and condensation. Isolde takes turns at random, Laurent can tell, but with no better plan and the sounds of pursuit like an avalanche behind them, he lets her. 

He grabs Jokaste by the bicep when she slips and hauls her forward until she can get her stride back, releasing her again as they skid into an ancient caved-in doorway and stumble after Isolde.

He’s on Jokaste blind side. She wants to ask him something. “Does Damianos live?” she says.

Laurent feels, suddenly, where he is. Underground, in his enemy’s home, in his enemy’s country. With damp creeping down his neck and sweat sliding under his arms and pain speared through his trembling, overtaxed thighs that will only get worse before the morning comes. 

He can feel warmth when he thinks of Damen. Warmth of fever, yes, and illness, but also the warmth of that first high summer week after they left Sicyon, when Jokaste languished in the back of their wagon and Charls gallantly carried their ruse and Laurent believed he was doomed to death and Damen, very quietly and sincerely, believed he wasn’t. 

Each memory is as painful as the other. “For now,” Laurent says. 

He catches a glimpse of Jokaste’s face as they pass under another rusting lamp: there’s a split in her lower lip, like a tear in a bolt of Charls' finest red silks, and it stretches dark and painful when Joksaste takes her lip between her teeth. 

“I’m sorry,” she says after a moment, her voice low.

“So am I,” Laurent replies, and then Isolde shouts and leads them up three stairs at a time to the ground floor of the house.

The door they find at the top of the steps hasn’t been used in half an age— ancient wood as tough as steel, but the iron bolt snaps like bone when Laurent puts his foot to it and moth-bitten linens tumble down in drifts as they shove the door back and force their way through the gap. A duvet lands on Laurent’s head. He lobs it into a corner. 

They pause outside the storeroom, in the bright lamplight of the hall with glimmering blue mosaics striped like ribbons over their heads. Jokaste, stubbornly upright, is the color of rancid flour. The bandages around her hand are soaked red and dripping. “Oh, your Ladyship,” Isolde says, and ducks back in among the linens. There’s an enthusiastic ripping noise, and then Isolde has reappeared and is taking Jokaste’s hand in her gentle grip, wrapping the new bandage directly over the last. 

“Where have you tied your horses?” Jokaste asks, eyes on Isolde’s careful fingers as Laurent looks up and down the hall for any indication of where in the house they are. 

“At the bottom of the hill, near the intersection with the sea road,” Laurent replies. Nothing. This is why he hates the royal palace at Bazal: the Patran fanaticism for interior labyrinths. “Although if there are any of Volsget’s we can steal, that would be preferable. We rode hard to get here.”

Jokaste makes a noncommittal noise. Laurent remembers the shouting at the paddock on their way in. He rounds on her. “Did you also poison the _horses?”_

“I did what I had to—” Jokaste narrows her eyes. “I beg your pardon, are you more concerned with my decision to poison the _horses_ than the _sixty guardsmen?”_

“Of course not,” Laurent replies sharply, turning away. Isolde is done, wiping her hands now on her trousers. Laurent leads them what he thinks is south. “It merely presents a logistical challenge.”

“Much like an extra sixty guardsmen might have,” Jokaste says to herself, not quietly, but then there’s the sound of further linens falling in the storeroom, the smash of wooden door against stone, and Laurent swears. 

They start running. They don’t get far. 

Every door down the corridor is either locked or an obvious dead-end, and when Laurent peels around the far corner four guards are already bearing down upon them, faces grim and swords up. Laurent swears again, emphatically. He and Isolde immediately back up, forcing Jokaste between them and into the corner of the wall, inattentive to her complaints. Laurent faces the four new guards, Isolde the three dust-covered gentlemen emerging from the linen closet and starting to sprint. None of the seven guards quickly approaching show any signs of incipient food-poisoning. Laurent sets his feet.

“The numbers are a little unfavorable,” Jokaste says, cramped, behind him.

“They are,” Laurent replies. “But I don’t intend to die here.”

There’s a pause, in which one might dramatically roll their eyes, and Jokaste replies, “Well, that changes _everything,”_ which is luckily the precise moment at which Tychaeus explodes through a wall and clotheslines two of Volsget’s guards. 

“—One way to do it!” Athamus is crowing through what must once have been a doorway, and was then a plastered-over piece of wall, and is now a 6’6” hole in the shape of Tychaeus. Laurent has only a moment to shake the dust from his eyes before one of the guards skirts the pile-up and lunges for him, but the fight, with Tychaeus and Athamus having made their entrance, is quickly resolved. Laurent disarms one guard, punches another in the throat, and looks up to discover Isolde and Athamus standing over two groaning bodies and Tychaeus hoisting a third into the air— arm straight out, hand in his collar. Laurent has seen Damen do it in bar fights. It has the same effect every time. 

The last guard, frozen twenty feet down the hall, drops his sword and runs. 

“Should we go after him?” Isolde asks, wiping her sword off on one guard’s tabard. “He may know how to get out of here.”

“No, let him go,” Laurent replies. “I suspect he’ll just run until he knocks himself out on a wall. Besides, with the benefit of our personal siege engine here, I think we’ll make good time to one exit or another.”

He gestures at Tychaeus. Tychaeus, covered from the scalp down in a snow of plaster dust, shakes himself off with the exuberance of a wet dog and grins.

There’s a grunt behind him, and Laurent turns. Jokaste, on her knees on the fine yellow tile, is attempting to wrestle off one house guard’s right boot. Laurent watches her do this for a moment.

“Would you like some help with your desecration?” he asks.

“It’s not desecration if he’s just unconscious,” Jokaste mutters, struggling with the heel, “not that I haven’t been known to desecrate,” and then she gets a grip around the ankle with the intact fingers of her left hand, winces, and thumps back on her rear with a low _oof._ “And I need shoes,” she says, staring at the boot held high in her right hand with a frown. It’s twice the size of her bare pink foot.

“Would these work, your Ladyship?” Tychaeus says, and holds up a spotless pair of women’s-sized Patran boots. Jokaste lunges for them. 

Isolde looks down at Tychaeus’ feet. She looks back up. “Tychaeus, those can’t possibly be yours.”

“No, but my brother always liked Patran leather,” Tychaeus replies in a pleasant rumble as Jokaste pulls the boots on with a victorious laugh, “and he’s a real little guy, so when we finished beating up one of the other guards, and he was also pretty little, I thought I’d just—”

“So sorry, your Majesty!” Athamus breaks in, attempting to wave a hand over Tychaeus’ mouth and instead slapping desperately at his collar. “Haven’t yet informed the lad about not telling nobility about the boot-stealing. We can give those right back.”

“Over my dead body you will, these are _lovely,”_ Jokaste says, wriggling her toes in the soft leather. “Give my apologies to your brother, soldier, I will not be passing these on to him.”

Tychaeus promises to do so. Laurent says, “And with that issue resolved, did you two happen to locate an exit in all your running around?”

“Yes, your Majesty, we went right past the front door at one point,” Athamus replies, patting off his beard, “but it might be difficult to get back to what with the fire.”

Laurent drags a hand over his eyes. “What fire.”

“This one’s not my fault,” says Jokaste, sounding impressed.

“No, no, your Ladyship, we just ended up in a bit of a fight in one of the finer bedrooms,” Athamus assures her, “and there was an incident with the brazier and the curtains, and things got a bit out of hand. We should be alright, so long as it doesn’t get the kitchens.”

Laurent pauses a moment, half-expecting the explosion. When none comes he ignores Jokaste’s exuberant smile in his direction and says, “Before it reaches the flour, then. We’ll leave before it reaches the flour. Athamus?”

They jostle back through Tychaeus’ hole in the wall and take off running, on through further corridors and sparsely-appointed sitting rooms and at one point a courtyard, as broad as a plaza, with fountains tinkling like birdsong and the sky vast and cloudless above them, awash in lightening grays, the morning star so bright it might be a pinhole viewing of the daylight to come.

“What was Genevote’s intent against you in Kempt?” Laurent asks as they reenter the house proper, once more among the vaults and columns of Patras’ grandest architecture.

Jokaste shoots him an odd look with her good eye. There’s sweat beaded like glass at her hairline, soaking dark into the back of her shirt. “What did Genevote want with _Theo,_ you mean?” Her breath comes in pants, nearly gasping. “She wanted what they’ve all wanted from Theo over the years.”

Faced with Laurent’s incomprehension, Jokaste’s disbelief is as frank as an open-hand slap. “Did you think they all _forgot me?”_ she asks, with no hint of mockery or sarcasm. “I was Kastor’s queen, I paraded my pregnancy like I thought—” her flashing smile is grim, the beautiful mosaics of the audience room running dreamlike underfoot “—like I thought my life depended on it. There was a year, maybe, after you let us go and embarked on your grand statecraft, when Theo and I were left alone. But then the first, some minor Akielon nobleman whose tidy slave business Damianos had ended found us in Vask and tried to convince me to let him use her as a pawn against you two. And when I said no, he made to kill me and take her by force.”

Laurent nearly breaks his nose against Tychaeus’ backplate when Athamus throws up a hand and brings them all to a halt, waving towards an antechamber. There’s the smell of smoke in the air, more pungent than it ever was in the burning hills along the border, and shouting coming towards them. The five of them bundle inside.

When Isolde swings the door shut, light is reduced to a wavering slash across the floor. Some piece of furniture, a bench, a footstool, jabs into the backs of Laurent’s knees and he must lean against its weight and prop his hand on the wall to keep his balance. The room is minuscule— Isolde’s elbow digs deep into a burgeoning bruise in his side, Jokaste is pressed against him ankle to shoulder. 

“How many were there?” he asks, soft, as boots thump outside the door and smoke-rough voices call for help, for water, for the Governor. They won't be able to stay in here long. 

He can feel it, as Jokaste considers the question. The dusty tendrils of her hair brush down his shoulder when she tilts her head. “I’ve officially lost count,” she says, not without humor. “It tapered off as you solidified Damianos’ reign. There were two separate attempts, the month Theo turned three, but Genevote was the first in a long time.”

“That’s why she hatched this whole plot? To punish you for humiliating her?”

“And to punish you, of course, for taking her mines and making her look a fool. She must have hoped you’d kill me. She wouldn't have known what you did for me at the Kingsmeet.”

“And Damianos was what— collateral damage? As he feared?”

Smoke is starting to trickle into the room, making shadows in the light at the bottom of the door, making Athamus cough silently into his elbow. The soldiers can hear them speaking, of course. They don’t say anything.

“A way to motivate you, perhaps,” Jokaste replies, “when she didn’t know what else might. A way to ensure a response. Or a secondary goal, if she hates Akielos as much as her little spy. I don’t know the details of her trade— maybe she lost money when the tariffs were stripped at the border. Maybe she hates him, too.”

Her long fingers twitch faintly against Laurent’s. “Maybe only a convenient way to hurt us both. Though she wouldn’t have known that, either.”

Laurent’s outstretched arm trembles wrist to shoulder with his weight. “Ilsebe didn’t mention any of this.”

There’s a soft snort. “Ilsebe grew up on too many adventure stories. And hasn’t even been around for the worst of it. I tell her we’re leaving town in the middle night, she considers it a day well started.”

Laurent smiles. “What about Theo?”

“Oh, she’s far too smart for me, she’d have figured it out in a matter of months if things hadn’t— come to a head, let’s say. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.”

Isolde, closest to the door handle, cracks the door and peers outside. The smoke gets thicker.

“Did you never consider coming back to Marlas?” Laurent asks, after a long moment. Jokaste is smiling still, softly, her eyes on something not crammed with them into this tiny room. “I cannot honestly say I know how we would have treated you if you’d shown up without warning, or that it would even have occured to me to return if I were in your position, but we would have kept you safe. I hope you know that.”

“I do,” Jokaste says quietly, “I never suspected otherwise. I thought about taking us home every night. As you would have, in my position,” she adds, meeting his eye. The room outside must be clear— the soldiers are filing out, leaving Jokaste and Laurent alone in a wedge of yellowing light. “But—” she smiles again, not from joy. “It’s the worst kind of selfishness, but I didn’t want to watch her grow up from a prison cell. Not if I didn’t have to. Not if I could keep us safe.”

“All on your own,” Laurent says, and the look in her un-bruised eye is monumental in its understanding. 

The explosion of the kitchens, when it finally comes, feels almost like a non-issue in the moment. The five of them are in a hall, massive and vaulted and heavily decorated, a great table stretching the length of the floor, when the shockwave hits and sends them stumbling, the thundering sound a physical pressure on their ears. Impressive, but without immediate consequence to them.

Then they get to the end of the hall, and Isolde and Tychaeus wrestle open the massive inlaid doors, and what is revealed is the entrance hall of Volsget’s mansion awash in flame, every hanging and pretty side table set alight, fire licking up to the ceiling as it climbs ebony banisters around the grand curving staircases.

And there, in the center of the whorled tile floor, staring out into the blazing dawn and shouting orders to his men, is the Governor himself.

He’s a big man, not so tall as Tychaeus but like a barge across the shoulders, heavy with muscle under fat and one hand wrapped around a sword seemingly half again as tall as Laurent. A beard like a briar thicket sprouts from his jaw, and when he turns at the scrape of the doors, a singed carpet of a cape swings from his shoulders.

Laurent remembers him, almost. From a function in Bazal, years ago, when Volsget still pretended to care when he was summoned to Torgeir’s court. Volsget doesn’t recognize Laurent. He doesn’t even look at him. His eyes, pinpricks of black in a face scored with fury, are on Jokaste.

_“You!”_ he bellows, tip of his sword gouging sparks from the floor as he pivots, then gets his sword up, then starts to run.

Tychaeus meets him first, blocking Volsget’s downward swing for Jokaste’s head with both hands on his blade and a shocked grunt. Isolde swings out from behind him, sword held to spear through Volsget’s broad side, but then Volsget disengages from Tychaeus and forces them both to duck in one huge sweep, still roaring at Jokaste.

“I’ll spike your head on my standard!” he screams. “I’ll send your broken limbs to every corner of Patras! _You’ve ruined me!”_

“I think you’ll find you did that yourself, Governor!” Jokaste shouts back as a half-dozen of Volsget’s men, drawn in by the clamor, drop their water buckets and reach for their swords. “Did you not realize how many loyalists worked in your home? How easy it was to convince your serving girls to let me free when you were out, to convince your cooks to serve the soldiers rancid meat before they fled? I barely had to fuck them at all! I just told them what you intended to do!”

Volsget screams again, a mad, painful sound, and then Laurent is pulled away as a pox-faced guardsman swings for his neck.

It immediately becomes a game of speed, how fast Laurent and Isolde and Athamas can kill the incoming guards before Volsget breaks through Tychaeus’ defense and runs his pike of a blade through Jokaste’s gut. Laurent is exhausted beyond imagining and aching in every muscle but he is still, bar one, the best swordsman he knows, and he dispatches three men in quick order before Isolde shouts. He helps her take down one sly bastard with a flail, then another whose swordwork is more than Volsget deserves, and the entire time he hears behind him Volsget’s shrieking furor as Jokaste taunts him to a froth.

She cuts off and Laurent whips around. There’s two guards suddenly upon her, Volsget howling with laughter as he beats back Tychaeus, and though Jokaste has improved the blade it won’t be enough— she spent half the night being tortured and has bled her way through a third of the house. She runs her stolen sword through one guard’s opening and into his liver and has almost gotten it free when the second guard swings for her. 

Laurent gets an arm around the man’s neck before he connects and impales him through the back.

“We need to go,” Jokaste pants, whole body heaving, blood streaming once more from her hand as Laurent drops the corpse. “Now, quickly. Something feels wrong.”

Laurent’s entire front is red, his left shoulder wet with blood from a hit he doesn’t remember taking. He nods, is about to say something, when Volsget finally batters Tychaeus to the ground and barrels towards Jokaste.

Laurent intercepts the swing this time, and it’s almost enough to break his back. Volsget’s arms swell with muscle, entire mountains and valleys of them, and Laurent is used to fighting a man far stronger than him, but not one who truly intends to kill him. Not in years. He angles his blade, slides Volsget down and off with his own momentum and a tearing pain in his shoulders, and is absolutely certain the next blow will kill him when Volsget’s back arches like a bow pulled to breaking. He howls.

Athamus stumbles back, hands shaking and eyes wide, a knife in his hand wet to the hilt. Volsget is turning, one arm bent painfully as he tries to close a hand over the wound in his back, but then Laurent slashes for his hamstrings and Isolde hacks into his shoulder and Tychaeus, rising and unsteady, drives a broken square of tile into his temple. It shatters like it’s hit stone, and Volsget lands on his knees with an animal noise, thick-tongued and failing. 

The entry hall is dark with smoke, brightening with the rising sun. The bodies of guards litter the tile, some moaning, some quiet. Jokaste takes the knife Laurent hands her and stands before Volsget. 

He’s swaying on his knees, hands twitching, blood like a river from the fountain of his skull. Jokaste grips his hair with the three remaining fingers of her left hand and pulls his head back. She puts the knife to his throat. She pauses.

“What?” she says, frowning. Volsget is mumbling something. She leans closer, her ear to his fumbling mouth. 

Laurent does, too, leaning forward on the point of his sword. “I dispatched them hours ago” Volsget is saying, with the deep satisfaction of victory. “Told them to head east on the continental road. By now, the brat’s already dead.”

Jokaste is pale as the grave. She digs her fingers into his scalp, drags the knife across his carotid, and screams. She doesn’t wait until he bleeds out, or tips over, or to see if Laurent or the others will follow. She drops the knife and runs.

Laurent scoops it from the floor and follows.


	9. Chapter 9

The ride back from Tenfleet Bay is painfully slow.

The horses, given only a few hours rest while Jokaste was rescued and the grand old mansion overlooking the harbor burned to the ground, manage little more than a disjointed lope as the sun glides into its morning position and the early travellers of Patras stare in open horror at five blood-soaked riders on four horses stampeding west.

An hour from the bay Laurent is forced to call a stop or else reckon with dead horses— Isolde’s poor gelding, carrying both her and Jokaste, foams at the mouth like a rabid dog. There’s fifteen silent minutes at a waystation that’s little more than a well and a shack as the horses guzzle water and Jokaste ties and reties the bandages around her truncated fingers. Laurent forces a chipped cup into her hands and stands over her until she, too, drinks.

When they finally come within sight of the forest surrounding the camp every anxiety is proven true. Smoke rises in gouts above the trees, and the smell of death thickens the wind like tar.

 _“No!”_ Jokaste screams, shrieking and desperate as Laurent’s blood shrivels and hardens in his veins, making every breath a painful glassy shattering as he starts to gulp for air.

They gallop the last stretch of road, gallop into the trees, nearly kill the horses on exposed roots and tumbled stones. Laurent’s nails cut bloody crescents into his palms around the reins. His vision is greying around the edges and sharpening in the center like it’s been focused a dozen times through glass. They reach the clearing.

There’s— it’s bodies. It’s all bodies. Strewn like ghoulish seeds across the undergrowth in stinking puddles of muck, flies swarming every open mouth and unseeing eye. The wagon is smoldering, the source of the smoke, and the cedar boughs above it crackle with heat. The tent is gone. Laurent stands in the mud that used to be dirt, before the bloody flood, and tries to understand what he’s looking at.

A score of dead soldiers, maybe more, and almost none of them are his. He sees one or two Veretian or Akielon uniforms and feels those deaths like breaks in his ribs, but there should be more, flashing like the carapaces of bugs among the Patran corpses. He left four soldiers to guard a traitor, a teenager, a child, a physician, and an unconscious man, and Volsget sent twenty against them.

It should have been a slaughter. And it was, but it doesn’t seem to have been Volsget’s.

“Where are they?” he manages, his voice a croak, his breath still coming too fast, his body waiting for the last dying sprint. Jokaste is wide-eyed beside him, trembling in every limb.

“Theo!” she calls, moving forward, stepping unsteadily between the bodies. _“Theo?”_

There’s motion in the trees, and Laurent’s head snaps to the left. He thinks for one ridiculous moment that it’s Damen, but the figure is too small, its steps too careful through the brush.

Felix steps into the morning sun, and Laurent’s thoughts scatter like rolling beads.

“Your Majesty!” Felix calls, and he’s running towards Laurent, waving one hand over his bobbing head. “Oh, your Majesty! We’re back here!”

Laurent’s feet move, though his brain provides no such instruction. Felix’s hair is just long enough to flop into his eyes, there’s stubble sprouting in stubborn little patches from his jaw. Felix should be in Marlas, Felix should be on the road back to Marlas, Laurent told him to leave and Felix sobbed the whole way through, but he’s standing in a forest in Patras in the middle of morning with a bandage wrapped around his hand and a scrape on his cheek and he’s pointing straight into the trees.

Laurent’s eyes follow his outstretched arm. There’s a path in the brush, which he takes, and a gap between the pines, which he enters, and something brushes at his tattered sleeve, and that’s Jokaste beside him, and then the forest opens up again, and Damen’s warm voice shouts, “Hey, _Laurent!”_

There’s another camp, no wagon but with plenty of people, Jord and Adenet and Priskos the groom and Symonne the quartermaster and Felix, coming up behind him and Jokaste both, Paschal retying a bandage on a woman’s arm, Pallas and Lazar squabbling cheerfully over a rabbit trap, it’s all of them, it’s everyone he ever convinced himself to send back to Marlas and everyone else who bore them across the border, and, sitting up against a stump with Theo quickly waking in his arms, is Damen, who’s smiling at Laurent with every crooked white tooth he’s got.

“Theo!” Jokaste sobs, no grief in it now, and Theo leaps from Damen’s lap with a shriek that could fell lions. She throws herself into her mother’s arms and knocks them both back as Laurent stumbles forward, unable to speak. Emotion is an estuary suddenly born in his heart, a torrent of freshwater let loose in the marshes, and when he reaches Damen he finds he’s dropped to his knees, thrown his arms around Damen’s tanned neck, and begun, absurdly, to cry.

Damen’s arms close around his back, pulling Laurent against his bare chest— will he _never_ put a shirt back on— one big, rough palm stroking up and down his backbone as the other cradles Laurent’s head and musses his disgusting, sweaty hair. “Laurent, what are—?” Damen asks, with a little disbelieving laugh. “Are you crying? Over me?”

Laurent buries his face in Damen’s neck and inhales raggedly. “Don’t start.”

“Oh, hey, hey, no, it’s alright,” Damen says, wrapping Laurent tight in his arms like he won’t let go for a year and day, putting his warm lips to Laurent’s temple, “I’m alright, love, I’m fine. Don’t cry, I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” Laurent replies, waspish, and then immediately: “No, you shouldn’t, that was idiotic, I’m sorry. I’m also sorry. Never do this to me again.”

Damen starts to laugh, his voice rumbling but sound, his heartbeat strong against Laurent’s bloody chest, and there is in these sensations a joy as loud and blinding and boisterous as the trumpets of heroes. Laurent holds onto Damen, and Damen keeps him close, and Damen tells him, no, no, never again. Never that grief again.

It’s not a promise he can keep, of course. But it's true enough for today.

Eventually, after a period of time in which Damen rambles a whole litany of sweet things into his ear and Laurent listens to every one, Laurent lifts his head from Damen’s shoulder. The camp is doing an admirable job of pretending they haven't just watched him get snot all over his husband, except for Felix, who is getting snot over himself as he stares with teary determination at the branches he and Ilsebe are stripping, and the general mood is one of celebration. Busy celebration, certainly, and the piquant whiff of corpses occasionally drifts in from the direction of the road— Jord is dispatching men to build a pyre— but it's so far from what he was expecting. Miles and miles and leagues and leaps from what he was expecting.

“I still don't understand where everyone came from,” Laurent says, watching Paschal rip a bandage from a sleeveless traveling robe that he knows once fell to Paschal’s ankles and would probably now reach his navel. “How they did get here? How did they know to find us?”

“Ah, that was all Felix,” Damen says, nodding his head towards the red-faced valet. “It only took him about a day to convince Symonne and Eukles that returning to Marlas would be a violation of every oath they’d ever sworn their king and country—”

 _“Felix_ said this?”

“Eukles said he was unexpectedly compelling,” Damen grins, “and also that Felix seemed pretty surprised he’d managed it himself. But either way, by that point they’d already caught up with Priskos, who also didn’t go back to Marlas when you told him to, and the four of them turned and rode after us. They stayed about a day behind us for most of the trip and convinced everyone else you discharged to join them. It wasn’t hard to do, apparently. We’re very beloved.”

Laurent smiles, because Damen has said something charming to him and the response is no longer one he has any control over, but he’s still watching the milling of people between the trees. “Jord organized the relocation of the camp?” he asks.

Damen nods. “I didn’t wake up until a few hours ago, just before Volsget’s men arrived, but apparently Jord and Felix and the rest of them got here only a half-hour after you took your three and left.” The riders Isolde had seen on the horizon, of course. “When you weren’t back by sunrise, Jord moved everyone further into the trees and ordered them to prepare for an attack. I woke up as they were trying to move me, actually— gave Paschal a bit of a scare.”

If only because Damen, disoriented and struggling, was a very hard man to move. “I believe I left orders to only start worrying if we weren’t back by midmorning.”

“Yes, and I _believe_ Jord assumed that if you hadn’t substantially surpassed your own expectations then we were in dire straits indeed,” Damen replies, which makes Laurent pinch his neck.

“You would be dead, if Felix and Jord and the others hadn’t disobeyed my orders,” Laurent says, after a long moment spent with Damen’s arms around him, sitting in sunlight. “Volsget’s men would have slaughtered everyone I left behind without hesitation.”

Damen gives this its due consideration. “Yes,” he says. “I think that’s true.”

Laurent exhales, feeling, hoping he feels, the last clots of some old and rancid dust shake loose from his chest. “I’m glad you’re safe,” Laurent says, meeting Damen’s curious gaze. “Thank you for being patient with me.”

Damen’s face softens in an instant. “Always,” he says, holding Laurent close. “That’s not something I need thanking for.”

He tells Damen at length about the events of the night, about Alienor and Genevote and Volsget and Jokaste. Damen heard some of it from Paschal and Ilsebe, Laurent’s desperate ploy to out the traitor and Jokaste’s final note, but he listens attentively and curses Genevote to the pits of the earth at all the appropriate moments. His eyes widen at Laurent’s description of Jokaste’s torture, and he goes into a mild panic when Laurent twists to show him the cut down his shoulder, hollering for Paschal even when Laurent tells him in scolding tones that it already stopped bleeding hours ago.

“She had her fingers sawed off, Damen, let him see to her first—” Laurent is saying before he’s interrupted entirely by a high voice shouting, “No, _Mama,_ you gotta come _talk_ to him with me!”

Laurent shoots a glance over his shoulder. Theo is bouncing at her mother’s feet, tugging her unbandaged hand towards the stump against which Damen and Laurent still lean as Jokaste pleads with a very loving exasperation for just one more moment with the doctor. Laurent looks back to Damen.

“Well,” he says, “I had intended this to be a longer conversation, perhaps one I wouldn’t be in your lap for,” which of course makes Damen’s arm settle more firmly around his waist, “but we appear to be running out of time. I don’t want to drag Jokaste back to Marlas with her hands bound, Damen. If she wants to take Theo and never see us again, I think we should let her.”

Damen’s lovely face opens wide in astonishment, his hands nearly losing their grip on Laurent’s body. “I— what? After all this? You don’t want to bring them back?”

“No, I do,” Laurent replies, firm, “but only if they both want to come. And I think Jokaste does— I hope Jokaste does, but we must give her the choice. We can’t just take her daughter from her, and we can’t hold her prisoner in Marlas while we raise Theo and somehow make a family out of that. Jokaste is— part of this family too, should it exist,” he says, and knows from the further slackening of Damen’s features that Damen had not considered this detail in full, either, until this very moment, “and I know your feelings about her, and they are rich with merit, but she gave sixty men food poisoning yesterday because they tried to keep her from her daughter and if we do the same to her and Theo we will be monsters beyond imagining.”

“I— yes, you’re right,” Damen starts, “this should have been a longer conversation, but—”

He’s interrupted, of course, by Theo finally dragging her mother across the motley camp, yammering like a jungle bird the entire way. “Good morning!” she shouts, “good morning!” as Jokaste shushes her in vain and Laurent finally slides off Damen’s lap to resettle at his side.

“Good morning, Theo,” Laurent greets her, smiling, as Theo holds her mother’s hand and twists like a sycamore seed on the ball of one foot and Damen leans in to his ear, and says, “I agree.”

Laurent twists, unable to contain his surprise. “What?”

Damen’s voice is barely even a whisper as Jokaste prompts Theo to sit with a hand on her head and looks between them with an uncertain gaze. “I agree with you,” he says. “Ask her.”

Laurent turns back to Jokaste and Theo in a mild daze, his grip on Damen’s hand so tight he’s expecting a crack. Jokaste looks to be in a similar state. The parts of her face not purple with bruise are still blotchy from crying and her gaze flashes to Theo with the regularity of a fly against a sunny window.

Theo doesn’t notice. She’s enticing Damen to make a cloverleaf with his tongue so that she can try to copy him, which she’s very bad at, and slapping her palm to the ground when Damen doesn’t comply fast enough. He laughs at her. She screams around her own tongue. Laurent watches in wonder. She was in Damen’s arms, too, when they got back— sound asleep.

Best to do it now, then. When all things seem possible.

“Do you want to come with us?” he asks Jokaste, quiet, in Kemptian. She looks up with a start.

“You’re giving me a choice?” She sounds stunned, though she doesn’t look it. The slap of shock across her battered features is little more than a flicker.

“So it would seem,” he replies, lips rising in half of a smile. “We won’t chase you again if you take her and go. And I can provide protection from our enemies if that’s what you want. If you’d prefer to truly leave, to cross the southern ocean, I can help you with that, too. It’s up to you.”

Damen is still indulging Theo, lavishing her with attention, but when the girl’s head is down, pointing at something in the dirt, he looks up. Jokaste’s eye-and-a-half is on him, searching, and though his fingers dig like roots into Laurent’s shoulder, Damen doesn’t look away.

“Is this from you, as well?” she asks, and they’re speaking classical Kemptian, nothing Theo could ever really understand, but she pauses in her playing and sits back on her heels, watching them, like she knows this will matter to her.

It takes Damen a moment, but then he says, “Yes. We’ll talk, if you stay. We need to talk. But— yes.”

They nod together, an unthinking synchronization. “Alright,” Jokaste says, a scratch in her voice she hasn’t yet cleared, the finches chattering like lovers in the trees, “we’ll go with you. She’ll be your queen.” And then in Akielon, for Theo to hear, “We’ll all go back to Marlas.”

Theo, as planned, absolutely erupts, begging for information about the fort and the town and the road and the weather and whether the sea will be close and whether she can play in it and whether the houses are as big as mountains there, too, and—

In the midst of this Damen and Jokaste share one more look, one last scrap of the language they once spoke so sweetly together. It seems to leave them both off-kilter, Damen swallowing heavily, making the apple of his throat bob, and a flush slowly creeping up Jokaste’s neck before she inhales sharply and lets it fade. Then she takes Theo by the shoulder, momentarily pausing her daughter’s demands for all earthly knowledge.

“Darling,” Jokaste says, turning the girl to face Damen as if presenting him for inspection, “this is King Damianos.”

“I know him,” Theo says like a protest, “he sang to me all morning! He’s not very good.”

Jokaste’s smile unfurls like a fern, sunlight striking her hair in clear, brassy notes. “You’re going to have to start being a bit nicer to him, my dear. He’s your father.”

Laurent squeezes Damen’s hand. The world explodes in song.

 

* * *

 

The investiture of Princess Theomache of Akielos, Vere, and potentially Acquitart (they’re still working out the legalities of inheritance by an adopted heir who is also an Akielon) takes place in Laurent’s formal office, in the chair he uses to write his letters, because they’re still scrubbing the blood out of the great hall.

“You don’t even have the decency to wait until I’m home before executing the woman who ordered my death?” Damen says to Nikandros, like he’s said to Nikandros every day in the week since they returned to Marlas, because he finds it incredibly funny.

Nikandros, crammed into a corner of this dark-panelled room, one shoulder pressed to Damen’s and the other hovering close to a portrait he has been explicitly ordered not to touch, glowers. “I didn’t _execute_ Genevote _,”_ he snaps, quietly, because the Master of Histories in Ios and the Veretian Secretary of the Archives have just entered the already-packed room, “she is alive in your cells right now!”

“For now,” Damen snorts. “You stabbed her in the gut in the middle of dinner, it’s amazing she isn’t dead already. I don’t want you to go without credit here.”

“It wasn’t dinner!” Nikandros hisses. “It was a poorly-staged coup!”

At this point Laurent would normally pronounce his scripted line, ‘She can be as dead as she likes once I get my signed confession,’ but this morning he did get his signed confession, in the bowels of Marlas’ dungeons, as one of Paschal’s assistants tended to Genevote’s wound and Genevote cursed bastards and spies and Laurent and Alienor and, above all, Jokaste. It took several mornings’ worth of convincing on Laurent’s part, an effort Damen saw no purpose in, and a final promise to bury Genevote’s finest jewelry with her. Laurent warned her of the inevitable grave robbers. She hadn’t seemed to care.

Alienor had watched the entire time, expressionless, from the neighboring cell. Laurent tried to speak with her only once. Alienor spat on him, their first day back in Marlas, and with Genevote’s confession he was content to let her hang.

Thus, presently, when Nikandros further attempts to defend his messy elimination of Genevote’s last-ditch twenty-man coup, Laurent shushes them both, and Damen grins as Nikandros shoots him a betrayed look.

“She looks so scared,” Jokaste says at Laurent's other side. Her posture is elegant, relaxed, perfectly appropriate to watching her daughter be crowned heir to two kingdoms in a very small, sweaty room, but Laurent can hear the worry in her voice. Theo, looking an entirely different child with her hair washed and in as an ornate a dress as they could find in the time provided, seems dwarfed by the setting. She perches on the seat of Laurent’s ancient chair, small hands wrapped tight around its arms. Her eyes are big and a little teary, but she keeps her head up, chin out, just like her mother asked her to.

“I know, but it’ll be over soon,” Laurent says to Jokaste. Well, the investiture will. Then there’s the acclamation, the presentation of the Councils, and also the parade of bannermen, which they couldn’t figure a way out of, but the whole nightmare shouldn’t take more than another few hours. His wedding to Damen took a week. “She’ll be running around the gardens and ruining that dress beyond all hope of repair before the morning’s done.”

Jokaste smiles. “You could just go hold her hand,” Damen murmurs overtop Laurent’s head. Jokaste frowns.

“You know she can’t do that,” Laurent replies, warning. This is also a conversation the three of them have had before.

“We made this ceremony up three days ago, while Paschal was sewing Jokaste’s fingers shut. Again. I think we can do whatever we want.”

“I truly don’t understand how you’ve borne this,” Jokaste says to Laurent, who spreads his hands out, palm-up, and raises an eyebrow. _Love. What can be done?_

The investiture begins. It's an absolute mess, not dissimilar from Damen and Laurent’s first day of vows in its haphazard mash of traditions and histories, and all mentions of queens, or mothers’ lineages, or really any implication that the heir in question has only two parents and they were formally wed when she was born, have been noticeably scrubbed from the proceedings.

The bastard princess holding her mother’s hand the entire time would certainly have made things worse, but perhaps not by much.

The room is packed tight with every man or woman of above-farmer standing Laurent could drag in to stand as witness to the morning, with a dozen more spilling out into the hall. Vannes, Berenger, Makedon, every kyros or councilmember within a two days’ ride, Ambassador Risha, because she was still in town and thought it sounded fun, all of them line the walls and heat the room and watch as the Master of Histories and Secretary of Archives each present a diadem to Theo and, unable to put them both on her head, place them on the table in front of her. Vannes covers her smile with a polite hand.

Laurent keeps his eyes on Theo when Damen starts coughing, if only because the sudden terrified slam of his heart is no longer a feeling he wishes to indulge. Damen is recovering, faster since they’ve returned to Marlas and Damen has been allowed to sleep fifteen hours a day on a bed that is not a horse, even if it’s not as fast as either of them would like. He coughs still, every day, and relies heavily on a cane. He asks Paschal when he can throw it on the fire, Paschal replies that he doesn’t know, can his Exalted Majesty walk down a hallway without falling over yet?— this, too, every morning. So the summer ends.

There’s a collective breath as a teary-eyed five-year-old finishes her lines and becomes the Princess of Vere and Akielos. Jokaste puts a hand to her breast. The Secretary of Archives clears his throat and says, “If you would permit it, Eminences, I would honor this moment with a speech.”

He was supposed to begin the acclamation. Martine taps Laurent on the shoulder seven minutes later, as the Secretary hits his stride and the Master of Histories begins to make throttling motions around his walking stick. “Are you sure?” Laurent asks her over his shoulder, leaning away from Jokaste and Damen. “During the rehearsal for our wedding it took the Historian five and a half minutes to challenge him for a duel. We’re well on the way to a new record.”

“If you can spare me the time, your Majesty,” Martine replies, with a seriousness that makes Laurent pause. Damen and Jokaste’s eyes follow him when he ducks out.

The crowd outside has grown since Laurent last checked it, and he and Martine must walk all the way to his and Damen’s rooms before they are given enough privacy to talk. Sunlight bounces eagerly through the suite, fall’s first hint of chill brought with it, and Martine plants herself squarely in the center of Laurent’s small library when she says, “Genevote is dead.”

Laurent nods, linking his hands behind his back as he exhales. It is an exquisite relief, even knowing it was coming. “Thank you for letting me know. Are arrangements being made?”

The curt bobble of Martine’s head approximates a nod. “She’ll be buried this evening, and her jewels added when they arrive from Revest-et-Mont. The rest of her holdings will be turned over to the Crown, with the exception of her arable lands that will be distributed to the local farmers. There’s—”

Martine hesitates, eyes fixed to the looping paisleys of Laurent’s carpet. Her hair is pulled back into its usual silver knot, and Laurent notes a rare few strands that have escaped to hang around her ears. “I must ask that you allow me to resign as your spymaster, sire,” she says. “I have failed completely and totally in my duties. My errors allowed for the development of a coup attempt, blinded me to any number of threats, and put you and King Damianos in incredible personal danger—”

He doesn’t need to make her do this. “Alienor’s your sister,” he says. “I know. I don’t intend to cast you off for it.”

He can hear the applause echoing out the hallway, the first of many such planned approbations. Martine stares at him with the unblinking intensity of a woman being offered a hand up from the executioner’s block. “How long?” she asks in a croaking voice.

“Not very. Jokaste and I had a conversation about the Beauvaus before we burned down Volsget’s mansion. I hadn’t known that Robert Beavau had nieces— you’re de Montclair’s bastard, aren’t you? How long was he able to keep you a secret?”

“I— ten years, before his wife— _sire,”_ Martine says, stumbling into a reprimand, “I should be _executed_ for what I’ve done, let alone removed from court, why would allow me to—”

“Because you have been a source of unflinching wisdom and utility these past three years,” Laurent says, with not a flicker of guilt at how often he’s interrupting her, “and that history is not erased by a simple mistake.”

“‘A simple mistake,’ _sire—”_

“Would you like to scold me or be fired by me?”

Martine’s mouth slams shut. She gives him a look of utter, baleful frustration.

It’s not the first time she’s turned it on him. He allows himself a smile. “I know you did not inquire into her past activities as much as you otherwise might have because she is your half-sister. I know you allowed her to accompany us to Patras for the same reason. I’ll ask you not to do these things again, but I won’t allow you to resign because of them. You have served our kingdoms too well.”

Martine’s mouth works, as if subduing her words before she allows them freedom. “King Damianos agrees?”

“Yes. He, too, recognizes how family makes idiots of us all.”

She laughs like it’s been kicked out of her, too loud and sudden for so poor a joke, but such is the way with nerves. A second round of applause, louder now, rattles the curtain rods. “Oh, sire, on the advice of your spymaster,” she says, rubbing one eye with the butt of her palm, “this is such a mistake.”

“But one I’m happy to make,” Laurent says, and nods towards the door. “You may quit tomorrow if you really like, but for now let’s go back. I believe one of my many parts is coming up.”

He asks her, as they’re reentering the hall, if she’s gone to see Alienor. “No,” Martine says, with a sigh. “She knows her father’s bastard ruined her life. Meeting the woman will do neither of us an ounce of good.”

“I’ll have to hang her for what she’s done. Likely soon.”

“Of course,” Martine says, stopping just at the limits of the hallway’s crowd. “It would be ridiculous to do anything else. It was— absurd of me to never vet her as I should have, simply because I had once had some childish hope that we might someday know each other as sisters.”

“Maybe so,” Laurent replies, “although it’s worked out well for me.”

“Sire—”

“I have a daughter now,” he says, and stuns them both with the delight in his voice. “Isn’t that incredible?”

The exasperation in Martine’s face melts away, her bowed lips threatening to smile. “We can talk more tomorrow,” he says to her. “Thank you for helping me bring them all home.”

She curtsies deeply. He re-enters his study, the crowd parting expectantly for him. Damen and Jokaste have already taken their positions for the acclamation, stationed on either side of Theo’s impromptu throne— Damen beams like sunlight off the sea, Jokaste stares at him in abject horror that he should delay the acclamation of his own heir. She is also holding Theo’s hand. Theo’s brave smile has grown dramatically braver.

The morning is ripe, the summer breathing its last, the princess ready for her people. Laurent takes his place in the riot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the ballgame! Immeasurable thanks to every kind reader who stuck with this thing through the unexpected hiatus, who picked it up after, who left a comment or kudos, or even just thought real hard about doing that. I felt that, I felt that good vibe, and I appreciate it. I'm so extremely, genuinely pleased if you've liked the past eight chapters, and I can only hope you like this one, too.
> 
> Thank you Phee, Lily, Nords, and special guest star Gogol, the kindest of cheer squads. Thank you Emma for reading along as I wrote every line of this story and telling me which of the jokes were best, for beta'ing literally eight out of nine chapters, and for not beating me to death with my own foot when I sneered at your very accurate and insightful edits. I made most of those changes eventually!
> 
> The title, as ever, for every piece of Captive Prince media I have ever produced it would seem, comes from [I'll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G1eLTV89dM) It barely even suits. I could have tried so much harder. [Rubble to Rubble by Wilderado](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ASV8tl4Bjo), while far from perfect, is really the #mood by the end of this thing. In case you were wondering.
> 
> I'm on tumblr [@lambergeier](https://lambergeier.tumblr.com/) and twitter [@lambergeier.](https://twitter.com/lambergeier/) Hit me up any time-- always love to talk about my own fic, and especially this one. Thanks, guys!


End file.
